BEFORE: This was the film that was originally supposed to be watched during the first week of February, only I had to drop "How to Build a Girl", and then this film along with it, in order to make the chain link up again - at one point Joanna Scanlan would have carried over from "How to Build a Girl", then Kevin McKidd would carry over to "Made of Honor", but look what happens when just ONE film from my plan isn't available. I'm just lucky I didn't have to scuttle the whole plan and re-work February, that has happened before - OK, so it was half of February, that one time, but you know what I mean. And it's also lucky there was so much redundancy in February's casts that I didn't lose more than one film, and that "Tulip Fever" was easily re-scheduled for mid-March.
Judi Dench carries over from "Victoria & Abdul". Today in Women's history, March 14, 1833 was the birthday of Lucy Hobbs Taylor, the first woman to graduate from dental school. And on March 14, 1866, Emily Murphy was born - she was a Canadian women's rights activist and the first female magistrate in Canada. Also it's the birthday of photographer Diane Arbus (born in 1923) and Heidi Hammel, astronomer who studied Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter with the Hubble telescope (born in 1960), also Simone Biles, the most decorated American gymnast, born in 1997.
THE PLOT: An artists falls for a young married woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait during the tulip mania of 17th century Amsterdam.
AFTER: My European tour continues - this one's set in the Netherlands, where the culture revoloved prominently around shipping, portrait painting, and an national obsession with tulips. Sounds about right. Oh, and prostitution - except for legal weed. you may find that not much has changed in Amsterdam in 400 years. But this is really a story where small decisions have large consequences, and situations tend to spiral out of control as a result.
It begins when Sophia, an orphaned woma,n agrees to become the wife of a wealthy merchant - Cornelis Sandvoort, the king of imported spices, like peppercorns - in exchange for her sisters' passage to the New World, probably New Amsterdam (now New York). She doesn't love the merchant, which may have something to do with her being unable to bear children for him - it's either a mental thing or perhaps the limited frequency of their sexual interactions has something to do with it.
At the same time, her maid, Maria, is in love with Willem, the local fishmonger. Cornelis wonders why he has to eat fish for dinner every night, and it's because Willem is always there making deliveries to the maid, if you know what I mean. Willem also has a side hustle, he's trading tulip bulbs in the underground auction, in order to raise money to marry Maria and start a family. But after his big transaction, a female thief steals his money, and when he accuses her, he loses a bar fight and gets drafted into the Navy, against his will.
At the same time, Cornelis hires an up-and-coming artist to paint a portrait of him and Sophia, his second wife. (His first wife died in childbirth, along with the baby.) Let's see, older husband, young wife, young hot male artist hired to hang around and paint the beautiful wife, what could possibly go wrong? Sophia finally finds love, only it comes after she's been married to the peppercorn king. Suddenly Sophia's interested in art, and the artist is very interested in her.
At the same time, Maria learns that she's pregnant, only it seems that Willem has abandoned her. And Sophia lands on a brilliant plan, to pass Maria's baby off as her own, with the help of a shady doctor and the fact that her husband, like most 17th century men, didn't really understand pregnancy and all the things that come along with it. They just have to hide Maria's pregnancy, keep Cornelis away from the birth, hand the baby over to Cornelis as if it's his own child, and what could be easier than that? There are even more unlikely parts of the plan, but that's the basic gist of it.
At the same time, Jan, the young painter, gets himself into the fancy tulip-trading trade, along with his screw-up assistant, Gerrit. He also needs to raise money, so that he can elope with Sophia, after the baby-swap swindle goes down. But this means he's got to get help from these tulip-breeding nuns, who just happen to have the rare bulbs that Willem was trying to sell before he got Shanghaied. Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch. Really, the whole plot is quite outrageous and nearly-impossible, which might explain why this film was completed in 2014 but not released until 2017. It seems that many attempts were made to re-edit the film to make it more coherent. But then again, maybe the collapse of the Weinstein Company due to allegations against Harvey Weinstein had something to do with the delays, too.
Also starring Alicia Vikander (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Dane DeHaan (last seen in "The Kid"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Jack O'Connell (last seen in "Money Monster"), Holliday Grainger (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Zach Galifianakis (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Matthew Morrison (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Cara Delevingne (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Tom Hollander (last seen in "Bird Box"), Cressida Bonas, Kevin McKidd (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Alexandra Gilbreath, Sebastian Armesto (last seen in "Bright Star"), Michael Nardone, Michael Smiley (last seen in "Birthmarked"), Johnny Vegas (last heard in "Early Man"), Simon Meacock (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), David Harewood (last seen in "Third Person").
RATING: 5 out of 10 bidding paddles
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