Holland

Holland

Blog Article

Mimi Cave’s “Holland” is a lifeless affair, a film that defies genre categorization not by virtue of doing too much but because it does almost nothing at all. On paper, it will sound like a thriller, but it’s a film that feels so consistently self-aware that it lacks actual tension. It will also sound like something that needs a dark streak of black humor, something that the Coens could inject into stories of Midwestern murder. But it is shockingly devoid of laughter, coasting along on the fuel provided by an always-game Nicole Kidman but uncertain where to drive her. It is a film that checks so many boxes on paper for this critic from my admiration for its stars to my love for the “secrets behind the picket fences” stories that inspired it to my familiarity with the Michigan location name-drops (Zehnder’s! Zingerman’s!) being raised in the area (go Lions). While watching a film full of reveals and twists, I kept thinking less about what would happen to the characters and more about what happened to this production.

Kidman, an actress who I will talk your ear off about how we have taken her talents for granted because we just presume/know she will always be good, plays Nancy Vandergroot, a teacher at a school in Holland, Michigan, an admittedly unusual city on the west side of the lower peninsula of the Great Lakes State. Holland has a strong Dutch influence, one that they pull out for events around tulip season, complete with costumes, a parade, and shows. Windmills and Dutch girls dot the backgrounds of this film, and one could dig in and presume that writer Andrew Sodorski is making a comment on artifice, people who put on costumes to hide their true selves. But there’s depressingly little use of that potential social commentary. It feels like one of many wasted opportunities here.

Nancy is married to Fred Vandergroot (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist, and the pair has a son named Harry (Jude Hill). Fred loves to play with a massive model train set in the Vandergroot basement, one that looks like it has detailed recreations of parts of Holland, both actual and imaginary. Again, artifice surfaces as a theme—a fake version of a town that has an air of falsehood in its Midwestern co-opting of European culture already—and the train set does provide a few interesting images and ideas as Pawel Pogorzelski’s camera swoops across the miniature landscape.

Set in 2000, mostly for a few needle drops and ancient phone technology, “Holland” opens with Nancy interrogating a babysitter named Candy (Rachel Sennott, sadly only given the one scene), who Nancy is convinced has stolen an earring. It sets Nancy on a suspicious temperature that rises when Fred goes on another business trip. Do optometrists really have that many conferences? And why did she find a crumpled-up ticket from Madison, Wisconsin, when he was supposed to be on the other side of Michigan? Suspecting that Fred is having an affair, Nancy sets off on an awkward investigation with a colleague from school named Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), who looks at Nancy like anyone would look at Nicole Kidman. As the two get closer to the truth about Fred, they get closer to each other, and the film flirts with the humor behind the idea that two people trying to prove infidelity would commit it themselves, but, like so many things here, doesn’t go far enough with it.

Kidman does her best to be the MVP of “Holland,” imbuing Nancy with just enough Midwestern nicety to make her memorable. Nancy is the kind of woman who wants to be a perfect wife and mother but also wants some mystery in her life and responds to the attraction of the handsome new teacher at her school. She’s a suburban shark, always swimming to a nearly impossible objective of keeping her pristine reputation in the community, holding her family together, and having a fling with Dave. While she doesn’t make any bad choices, there’s a version of “Holland” that lets Kidman loose, turning the temperature up on this character’s emotions in a manner that Cave feels tentative to do. This should be a big character, one who commands attention in every scene. She often does just because it’s Kidman but it’s a character that needed its volume turned up several notches to be truly effective—someone quirkier, crazier, hornier. Just -ier.

If Kidman needed her volume turned up, Macfadyen and Bernal are on mute. The always solid Bernal gets a non-character, existing almost solely to unpack the drama in Nancy’s life. Macfadyen makes out a little better, selling the kind of man who can bury his dark secrets and go about the mundane day-to-day of life in Western Michigan, but he too becomes a cog in the plot machine.

“Holland” does eventually get some squirmy places, but it’s too late to have an impact beyond morbid curiosity. It’s a story about how people hide their true selves behind costumes like the perfect wife or even the forced whimsy of Tulip Season. Its tragic misstep is how much it refuses to actually look under those surfaces.

for more movies like Death of a Unicorn visit  on 123movies