美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Tulip Fever': A Lush Portrait Of A Florid Affair（在线收听）

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The movie "Tulip Fever" opens today in more than 700 theaters across the country more or less undercover. If you haven't seen any reviews of the movie yet, it's because the Weinstein Company placed an embargo on them until this afternoon. Ours is out now. Here's NPR critic Bob Mondello's take on the costume drama "Tulip Fever."

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Amsterdam 1634 - a town gripped by tulip mania. But the film's first order of business isn't bulbs. It's babies. A wealthy merchant's much younger wife is visiting a doctor.

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ALICIA VIKANDER: (As Sophia) Cornelis is so old, but he's very willing. Still, he saved me from a life of poverty, and I must repay him. He wants a son, and I've not been blessed. Mrs. Overvalt said you can help me.

TOM HOLLANDER: (As Dr. Sorgh) Of course. This way.

MONDELLO: He leads her to the next room, marveling at his own good fortune - a wealthy client, attractive.

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VIKANDER: (As Sophia) Thank you.

HOLLANDER: (As Dr. Sorgh) There's the bed - on your back or your front - up to you.

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MONDELLO: She realizes what he intends.

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HOLLANDER: (As Dr. Sorgh) A thousand apologies.

VIKANDER: (As Sophia) How dare you?

MONDELLO: Her husband, meanwhile, though not entirely giving up on having children is looking for other ways to live on after he's gone. A portrait might do the trick, he thinks.

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CHRISTOPH WALTZ: (As Cornelis) And when everything else about me has been forgotten, they'll say, look there at that lucky, old dog. Didn't he have a lovely, young wife?

MONDELLO: To keep the price down, he hires a promising, young painter. But handsome, young painter, lovely, young wife - different problem.

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VIKANDER: (As Sophia) What are you looking at?

DANE DEHAAN: (As Jan Van Loos) What am I looking at?

MONDELLO: It doesn't take many posing sessions before the painter is doing more than just looking.

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DEHAAN: (As Jan Van Loos) God help me. I'm in love.

MONDELLO: And a few sittings later, when a pedal drops from a tulip in a vase and the merchant murmurs...

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WALTZ: (As Cornelis) First to flower, first to fall.

MONDELLO: ...His wife and the painter exchange alarmed glances. Could they have been found out? Director Justin Chadwick keeps them dashing through Amsterdam's teeming streets and markets to avoid detection, lingering a while in the ones where traders calculate dividends while bidding up speculative tulip futures. Plain tulips are a florin a dozen. But let there be a crimson streak in a white bloom, and as a bulb-savvy nun played by Judi Dench can tell you, there's money to be made.

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Why are you weighing them?

JUDI DENCH: (As Abbess) The more they weigh, the more they're worth - also the more babies. Look. These little nodes - each one will become a bulb. Here is a node from our best bulb. It sold for 920 florins at auction. Unfortunately we had already sold it privately for 18 - hidden amongst ordinary, simple-colored flowers. But it's found its way home by the generosity of the next purchaser, who had sentimental memories of me from many years ago. Never underestimate God. He forgets nothing.

MONDELLO: Based on the best-seller "Tulip Fever" by Deborah Moggach, the screenplay blends virtue and vanity, God and gilders, bulbs and blackmail. And if it has too much of some of those to fit comfortably in one movie, it has still been cleverly penned - I'm picturing with actual quills - by Moggach and by playwright Tom Stoppard. His "Shakespeare In Love," remember, brought wit and romance to this same period a while back. "Tulip Fever" is not in that league, but it's lush and boisterous and crammed with the sort of arts, gossip and commerce trivia that go nicely with gilded frames and talk of tulip futures. Where else would you learn, for instance, that Renaissance painters dressed the Virgin Mary in blue not because it was the color of purity but because it was the color that cost the most.

Ultramarino, explains our lovesick painter, means blue from across the sea. Count that little tidbit as a dividend paid by a movie that lets its characters get perhaps too feverish over blooms but that has the good sense to dress its leading lady in ultramarine when she is sitting for that portrait. I'm Bob Mondello.