By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Review of Tulip Fever
When
you attain fame and win two supporting Oscars (for
Inglourious Basterds and Django
Unchained) by nailing Quentin Tarantino lines with an Austro-German accent,
the lack of such crackling lines can be a handicap. Still, Christoph Waltz is echt pro. Playing a sturdy Dutch burgher
in Tulip Fever, with only a few sharp-tongued
remarks, doesn’t stop him from being the best actor in the movie.
What
an odd, spotty, almost sophisticated movie it is. A throwback to old studio
history pictures, when bulging cargos of plot were hauled across a shining Bijou
screen in galleons of melodrama. In this busy plot, the rich Amsterdam trader
Cornelis (Waltz), mourning his family lost to sickness, virtually buys himself
a virgin bride, Sophia (Alicia Vikander). Fresh from a convent orphanage, where
the head nun (Judi Dench) has the sly cunning of a Vatican-worthy Gordon Gekko,
Sophia always looks a bit underfed. She can’t get pregnant, maybe because aging
Cornelis has trouble perking up his “little soldier” (his phallic metaphor – a wry wink, but not a Tarantino zing).
Cornelis
is cuckolded by his (and Sophia’s) young portrait painter, Jan, who is no
Rembrandt or Vermeer. But Dane DeHaan does have facial echoes of a Leonardo: Di
Caprio, circa 1995. There is a parallel plotline about Sophia’s servant and a bold,
studly fishmonger. The painter plunges into the Dutch tulip craze, circa 1637,
a speculation fever for exotic flowers with rare color striations (caused by a
plant virus). The more intimate plunges of Jan and Sophia feature limited
acting but lovely vistas of nudity, enshrined in what Hollywood used to call
“Rembrandt lighting.” Cornelis becomes both a gullible dupe and an endearing
hopeful, although Waltz often seems half-buried in his fabulous neck ruff.
Playwright
Tom Stoppard, adapting a popular novel, may have let down director Justin
Chadwick with his juicy but hectic script. They should have studied how
Antonioni filmed stock trading mania in Eclipse,
and how Jacques Feyder piled on Old World exhuberance in Carnival in Flanders. It doesn’t help that lean, pretty Vikander is
less vitally sexy and light-catching than Holliday Grainger (the high-spirited
servant Maria). Still, there are splendid sets wrapped around a canal,
impressive photography by Eigil Bryld, and even a fat, drunken Bacchus on a
donkey. Climaxes plop into place with an “OK, now I get it” resolution. Waltz is
quite fine, though he isn’t starring in Rembrandt.
Charles Laughton did so brilliantly, in 1936, but didn’t get an Oscar
nomination.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
In Orson
Welles’s Touch of Evil, Janet Leigh
has a special spark that she doesn’t quite have even in Hitchcock’s Psycho, and she explained why: “We
rehearsed for two weeks prior to shooting (and) rewrote most of the dialog, all
of us, which was also unusual. Mr. Welles wanted our input. It was a collective
effort, and there was such a surge of creativity, of energy. You could feel the
pulse growing … felt you were inventing something. Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want even one
bland moment. He made you feel involved in a wonderful event.” (From Marc
Eliot’s new book Charlton Heston).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
It
could well be the funniest American movie, but Mel Brooks’s The Producers received, like most
comedies, modest attention at the Academy Awards: “Zero Mostel got no Oscar nomination.
Gene Wilder lost, as supporting actor, to Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses, but Mel provided
him with excellent compensations, Blazing
Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
Brooks won the 1968 original script prize, probably for the bravura of his risk-taking.
Surpassing any award was this puff by Gene Shalit, which justified his entire
career as a TV blurbster: “No one will be seated in the last 88 minutes of The Producers. They’ll all be rolling
around on the floor.” (From the Zero Mostel/The
Producers chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Mischa
Auer (left) and Robert Arden eyeball each other in Mr. Arkadin (Mercury Productions, 1955; director Orson Welles,
cinematographer Jean Bourgoin).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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