Review of Tulip Fever (2017) by Robby K — 07 Sep 2017

I honestly find it pretty intriguing when the story behind a movie's production and distribution is better than the movie itself. That obviously doesn't mean that the movie is fascinating by association; it's usually really bad under such circumstances.

Tulip Fever, which was filmed in the summer of 2014 and was dumped into theaters on the Labor Day weekend of 2017, had four previously release dates before The Weinstein Company burped it into 765 theaters.

It had several stars such as Jude Law and Keira Knightley attached, who left the project due to its constant delays, and Steven Spielberg was meant to produce. With all of these things falling through, you could get an idea of what kind of film Tulip Fever would end up being, and your idea is probably right.

This isn't just the type of dog slow, hollowed-out vanity project that such a description would lead to-it's even worse. It's alarmingly bad and hopelessly messy, and dear God, is it boring.

Taking place during tulip mania seventeenth century Amsterdam, the movie follows Sophia (Alicia Vikander), who is trying to conceive a child with her older husband Cornelis (Christoph Waltz). When he decides to have a painter named Jan (Dane DeHaan) create a portrait of the couple, Sophia begins to fall in love with him, leading her and Jan to invest in the skyrocketing tulip market in hopes of making a future for themselves.

And while this is ostensibly the main storyline, it's quite hard to tell. Drowning in an endless array of subplots, the central plot itself feels like an afterthought that's been schlepped together.

Nothing makes sense and no one onscreen holds any weight as a real human being. All relationships are shockingly dull, and the structure of the movie stitches everything together with the grace of a drunken mortician sewing up a mutilated and abandoned corpse.

The script, written by Tom Stoppard and Deborah Moggach from the latter' novel, is one of the worst of the year. With no natural progression or care for tone, it feels as if a committee of aliens tried to replicate human behavior, wrote a miniseries that got rejected for commission, and then starved it until it could fit into the perimeters of a 107-minute movie (and Lord, does it feel longer than that.

) Director Justin Chadwick seems to have given up partway through production. The filmmakers insecurities in their own work lead them to fall back on sexual humor that's entirely misplaced and falls on its face.

Pratfall comedy, toilet humor, innuendos, and wacky music cues feel like something out of an entirely different movie, often times vying for attention in the same scene of what is meant to be genuinely dramatic.

The editing from Rick Russell does no favors at all; in fact, it's Suicide Squad-level bad at times. It's as if he was presented with an overt amount of coverage for each scene and was commanded to not waste a single shot, leading him to squeeze in inserts a slight variations in angles at every turn.

This, combined with the unjustified handheld camerawork used for a majority of the film, is whiplash-inducing, and it further does no favors when so much of the project was clearly shot on a soundstage.

It's fitting, in an unintentional way, since Tulip Fever is easily one of the most inorganic dramas that I've seen in quite a long time. There was one other person in the theater when I saw this movie earlier today, and I felt a sort of unspoken connection in our shared suffering.

But alas, she walked out less than halfway through the movie. To be fair, I can see why she did so, given that the movie seemed to be twice as long as it was, but my having to endure a disaster like this alone only left me with a sense of pity at times alleviated by the inherent fascination of such incompetence onscreen.

But I also came across a person on the train on the way to the theater who appeared to be drunk well before noon, and I could have just watched him ramble about for a few hours. After all, he demonstrated a better grasp on reality.

2.2/10, disastrous, D-, leagues below bad, etc.