Tulpenfieber (2017)

Tulpenfieber: Directed by Justin Chadwick. With Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O’Connell, Holliday Grainger. An artist falls for a young married woman while he’s commissioned to paint her portrait during the Tulip mania of seventeenth century Amsterdam.

“Tulipmania is one of Europeu0026#39;s weirder historical events. Unfortunately, the movie barely touches on the tulip market craze, except as a deus ex machina to bestow sudden wealth and/or loss on characters who we barely care about and who do nothing to deserve it. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe main problem with the film is that the love triangle that is supposed to be the main story appears out of nowhere — one of the characters simply looks up pensively, as if he just solved a riddle, and declares, u0026quot;Iu0026#39;m in love!u0026quot; Up until that point, he had shared maybe 60 seconds of screen time with the object of his affection. How can we care about the contrived swings in fortune of such shallow people? u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eMaking things worse, this love triangle movie has five main characters, leading to underdeveloped characters, repetition of ideas and unnecessary subplots. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI loved the sets and I thought that Christoph Waltz, Holliday Grainger and Jack Ou0026#39;Connell did great jobs with the little they had to work with.”