Holland is about as subtle as a kick in the face with a clog.
This film, which very much wants to be Blue Velvet or Fargo, stars Nicole Kidman as yet another sex-starved woman longing for danger. (Someone please check on Keith Urban. The guy’s got to be freaking out by now.)
It is set in the town of Holland, Michigan, a real place that leans into its Dutch heritage for tourism purposes. There’s a windmill, an annual tulip festival, and multiple options for thin pancakes. (DeBoerr’s Bakkerij looks splendid.) If nothing else, this forgettable direct-to-Prime Video dud has made me aware of a fun-looking place. If I’m ever on a road trip through the area, I’ll be sure to make a stop.
That’s an act of defiance, I suppose, against the movie, which is directed by Mimi Cave (Fresh) and written by Andrew Sodroski (Manhunt). It depicts Holland’s citizenry as braindead losers who seem, at first, to be clownishly friendly, so therefore must be harboring deep, malicious secrets.
Kidman’s Nancy Vandergroot’s shattered illusions begin when she loses an earring and suspects her kid’s tutor (Rachel Sennott) of taking it. This imbalance in her perfectly ordered home—kitschy porcelain on the shelves, an elaborate crafting room, model trains in the garage—leads to some snooping, then circumstantial evidence that her straightlaced, pillar-of-the-community husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) must be having an affair. (Her initial revelation comes while watching Mrs. Doubtfire, which is an amusing touch.)
Nancy, a home ec teacher at the local high school, enlists her one confidante, shop teacher Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), to help her suss the situation out. Bernal is playing against type here. He’s a mild-mannered twerp (who’s had a crush on Nancy for years), but the simple act of conspiring with him has turned him into an Adonis in Nancy’s mind. An initial action—unlocking a bathroom window at Fred’s optometry office—is staged like a heart-pounding Ocean’s 11 heist. In better hands, treating that kind of low-stakes sequence with immense Hollywood tension would make for good satire. Sadly, it doesn’t quite come together here.
Though it pains me to say so, a lot of the fault lies with Kidman. (I apologize to the stans and accept your condemnation.) Her instinct is to go broad and campy with the part, and it gets tiresome very quickly. Each line delivery is slow and loud, and she comes across like a caricature of a nitwit. Fine for SNL, not for a whole movie. She’s front and center in pretty much every scene, so there’s not much escape, I’m afraid.
Things get worse when Nancy and Dave follow Fred to another one of his suspicious optometry conference business trips. Is he really having an affair at the faceless, brown Sheraton? No, of course not, but what he is doing is preposterous. It’s at this point when I sighed and looked down to realize there was still 30 minutes left in the movie. And each of those 30 minutes seemed to be in competition to see which could be the most far-fetched.
The thing that bugged me the most about Holland—which isn’t terrible, merely blah—is just how easy and safe the whole thing feels. What if there were a movie about people who lived in the Midwest and cooked meatloaf and organized dances at the church and weren’t actually sickos?
I realize I sound like J.D. Vance right now, but the truth of the matter is that an A-lister like Nicole Kidman appearing in something like that would be so surprising we’d all be on the edge of our seats the whole time. There’s drama in the tulip festival if you are creative enough to find it.
