If you’ve got ‘Tulip Fever,’ we’re afraid there’s no cure
Long-delayed drama lands with a thud
Tulip Fever is, in fact, a real movie.
I wouldn’t believe it myself, if not for the crumpled ticket in my pocket and nine other curious souls who congregated Friday at New York’s Angelika Film Center for an 11:40 a.m. showing.
My astonishment isn’t unwarranted: The period romance starring Alicia Vikander and Dane DeHaan opened in theaters after two years of continually reshuffled release dates. The bungled marketing only added to its infamy as The Weinstein Company resorted to a nudity-packed trailer and Deadline op-ed by producer Harvey Weinstein in a last-ditch attempt to sell the film.
It appears Vikander’s mom’s friend may be one of the few people who liked Tulip (a fact that Weinstein actually used in its defense). The $25 million drama made less than $1.5 million in 765 theaters over the Labor Day weekend.
Given the film’s pedigree — based on the best-selling novel by Deborah Moggach and featuring three Oscar winners (Vikander, Christoph Waltz and Judi Dench) — it’s hard not to chalk this up to anything but a monumental embarrassment that those involved are seemingly trying to forget.
But is Tulip really as bad as its thorny history suggests? The short answer: yes and no. Set in 17th-century Amsterdam, the story follows an orphan, Sophia (Vikander), who is forced to marry wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort (Waltz) after his first wife dies in childbirth. Unhappily wed and unable to bear Cornelis a son, Sophia has a sexual awakening when her husband commissions a mousy young painter, Jan Van Loos (DeHaan), for a double portrait. Cue the montages of sto- len glances, stilted lovemaking and banal pillow talk.
For spending virtually all their screen time together entwined naked in bed, Vikander and DeHaan lack anything even remotely resembling chemistry, which makes the movie’s sales pitch of “the year’s sexiest thriller” misleading at worst, laughable at best. Their wooden performances are further saddled by painfully on-the-nose dialogue: “You’ve stolen my heart.” “And you’ve stolen mine.”
Describing their knotty affair in a pivotal scene, Vikander somehow manages to say with a completely straight face: “Tell Jan I’m sorry. Tell him the fever broke.” At least she has it better than Waltz, whose shouts of “Fire the canons!” mid-coitus make for the most flummoxing sex scene ever put to screen.
But its stars aren’t entirely to blame for making Tulip so unsexy — Tom Stoppard’s bizarre script manages that on its own. The movie begins with a dryly narrated history lesson about the lucrative tulip market in Europe. From there, the sex scenes are but a blip compared with the amount of time allotted to buying and selling tulip bulbs.
Ultimately, Tulip Fever is so workmanlike and unfocused that it never blossoms into the pulpy “so bad it’s good” melodrama it should be. No moviegoing companions could make it anything but a withering bore, so save your money and let this one die on the vine.