Tiptoe through the tulips

Tulip Fever has finally whimpered its way into theaters, after a gestation that became the stuff of snickering legend. The Weinstein Company optioned Deborah Moggach’s novel in 1999 (with, it’s said, visions of another Shakespeare in Love). It almost went into production in 2004 with Shakespeare’s John Madden directing, but it was another ten years before the cameras rolled; by now the director was Justin Chadwick, with a script by Moggach and Shakespeare’s Tom Stoppard. Its release was repeatedly announced and postponed. Rumors of desperate recutting circulated. Clearly, after all that, here was a movie that would have to be superb just to be OK.

Now it’s here, and it’s … OK.

Alicia Vikander plays Sophia, a convent orphan married to Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), a middle-aged Dutch merchant and widower in the market for a son and heir. In return for Sophia’s hand, he offers to send her younger siblings for a fresh start in New Amsterdam, and for their sakes Sophia agrees. Cornelis is a bit stodgy but he’s a decent sort, and Sophia is a dutiful wife, obligingly pliant whenever he climbs aboard with his “little soldier,” and she lies there no doubt thinking about her sisters off in America.

After three years the union remains childless. Cornelis, opting for another form of immortality than siring progeny, commissions a conjugal portrait of the two of them from a promising young painter, Jan Van Loos (DeHaan). One look and Sophia and Jan are smitten with each other. Before long they’re strewn across the bed in his garret, arranged in the same sort of artful peekaboo nudity as Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love.

Parallel to this is an earthier affair between Sophia’s servant Maria (Holliday Grainger) and the fishmonger Willem (Jack O’Connell)—with more chemistry than Vikander and DeHaan. Both stories play out against the background of the Dutch “tulip mania” of 1636 over the recently introduced flower (before the bubble burst in early 1637). The fortunes of all four lovers ride this boom-and-bust wave.

When Maria becomes pregnant, she and Sophia embark on an elaborate charade, pretending that Sophia’s the one who’s expecting. Cornelis, not having noticed that his wife is cheating on him, swallows the hoax, making us wonder how he ever made a go of his spice-import company. Things become increasingly garbled in the last act, suggesting that either director Chadwick (on the set) or the Weinsteins and editor Rick Russell (in the three years following) kept losing the thread of the story.

In the end, for all its handsome sets (Simon Elliott), costumes (Michael O’Connor) and photography (Eigil Bryld), and for all its pedigreed cast (Cara Delevigne, Kevin McKidd, Zach Galifianakis and Dame Judi Dench) Tulip Fever just sort of lies there like a table full of wonderful ingredients waiting for the master chef to enter the kitchen and whip up either a hearty meal or a luscious confection.

No master chef ever shows up, though there may have been too many cooks.