But the outrageously selfish scheme that they embark on - involving another woman’s pregnancy, an ethics-challenged doctor of “female mysteries” ( Tom Hollander) and a big gamble on tulips - further distances them from the audience.

Though Sophia and Jan’s course of action isn’t meant to be sympathetic, it should at least be involving. The screenplay, credited to Moggach and Tom Stoppard, leaves the churn of emotional upheaval and danger described more than felt. He’s a cipher, and she’s a collection of backstory facts, and two actors who have been riveting elsewhere come off as pallid stand-ins for narrative ideas. No matter how languorously their naked bodies entwine or how ardently Jan grinds his ultramarine to capture the blue of Sophia’s silk dress, their affair is as lacking in dimension as their characters. To underscore what’s already clearly telegraphed in Chadwick’s direction, when Jan lugs his easel and paints into his new clients’ home, the film’s voiceover narration, delivered by the Sandvoorts’ domestic servant, Maria (Grainger), assures us that “upheaval entered the house.” To which you might respond: Really?

But then again, he’s sixty-something, stodgily Protestant and refers to his penis as “my little soldier” - something that we can safely presume the bedroom-eyed Jan does not do. When she hasn’t produced one after three years of marriage, he seeks a different form of afterlife, hiring an up-and-coming painter, Jan van Loos ( DeHaan), to memorialize him and Sophia in a portrait.įor Sophia, an orphan raised in a convent, her marriage to the prosperous “king of peppercorns” is a deal that she feels bound to honor because he saved her from a life of poverty. A widower who has taken a much younger second wife, Sophia ( Vikander), his pressing concern is immortality: He longs for an heir. The flower’s bulbs have become the subject of frenetic bidding in the back rooms of taverns, a commodities exchange that creates overnight fortunes and sends some investors into the canal in suicidal despair.Ĭornelis Sandvoort (Waltz), a wealthy importer, has no need to speculate in the tulip market. Hitting the sweet spot between the drive for profit and the fetishization of objects of beauty is the exotic tulip. It’s a city in the flush of a new modernity built on the wealth of international shipping and trade. With strong contributions from production designer Simon Elliott and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, Chadwick does, however, convincingly conjure the Brueghelian hubbub of 1630s Amsterdam. Why 'Tulip Fever' Took Nearly 20 Years to Reach the Screen (Guest Column)

Tulip fever novel