‘I’ve appointed the services of a painter,’
After a three year long delay in the release of this film, I finally had the pleasure of watching Tulip Fever. The film is based on the book by Deborah Moggarch, and it follows a rather familiar story, narrated from the maid’s perspective, of a young painter named Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan) who is commissioned to paint a portrait of a married woman named Sophia Saandvoort (Alicia Vikander) and her older husband Cornelius (Christoph Waltz), which ultimately results in an affair with Sophia and Jan during the tulip mania in 17th Century Amsterdam. It also stars Judi Dench.
I don’t know if it was from the sup-par reviews, the prolonged wait for release, or the fact that Harvey Weinstein produced it led to a somewhat judged response. The story has been done in so many ways before that it is nothing but a huge cliche. The Girl With a Pearl Earring had a similar plot-line to this. In some ways, so did Titanic. Despite his cruel intentions, the Christoph Waltz character was shown as the bad guy. I don’t think that he was necessarily ‘bad’ at all. He was just misunderstood and had some rather controlling, arrogant motivations, though I do not intend to trivialize such things. As always, Christoph Waltz makes his antagonist characters watchable, and depending on the role, somewhat lovable. Alicia Vikander led a so-so performance as the lead female character who we as the audience are led to believe is drawn to the wanted desires of Dane Dehaan’s character. As a former art student, I have some sympathies towards his character, though if I remember correctly, Dehaan and Vikander exchanged a few sentences of dialogue to each other before we were thrown into what was supposed to be believable romantic plot line between the two of them. Jack O’Connell, Judi Dench and Cara Delevigne were thrown into the star studded mix too.
Generally, it is a good cast of brilliant actors, but the only problem with all star casts is the fact that it sometimes feels like a beautiful empty cake. You can add as many decorations (the well known actors) as possible but there still needs to have substance to make it a remotely good film. The scenery also looked stunning, and the costumes were accurate. There was nothing wrong with the actors at all. In fact, I’ve seen Dane Dehaan in an awful lot of films recently. The film itself just seemed tiresome and a little dry, though I’m glad that it was tied up neatly at the end.
2/5
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