Justin Chadwick

I'm torn about this one.

I feel like all of the actors turned in worthwhile performances, and that Christoph Waltz absolutely stole the show. He was beyond reproach, and I enjoyed how everyone else played their parts well enough that you could invest your opinions into each character's behavior and feel it was worth doing so.

I loved the concept of the ending, and how I went into this movie expecting certain tropes to be true of various characters, only to have those expectations turned upside down.

Having said that... Whomever cut 'Tulip Fever' has committed a gross injustice to the movie. More than once the movie felt rushed and sloppily put together, as if all of the right components were carefully crafted and submitted, only to have a toddler haphazardly glue them to a piece of construction paper.

I wanted to love this movie, and I still have so many good thoughts for the story. Maybe if it'd been a mini-series of sorts it could have been presented better.… (more)

This film sets out to be a love story set against the 'tulipmania' of 17th century Netherlands. The basic plot (woman sold into arranged marriage, has affair with artist hired to do portrait) is hardly original, and the mainspring of the action involving a baby is scarcely credible. There are lots of scenes of tulip selling but the mechanics are not well explained and the result is often confusing. But perhaps the worst part of the film is that none of the characters, except perhaps Judi Dench's acerbic abbess, seem to be real three dimensional people. The end is very predictable. The period settings, which concentrate on the contrast between private comfort and public squalor, are okay. The film was apparently mangled by the studio after it was made, but would perhaps have been best not started at all.… (more)