Re: Holland (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video). Is this how Minnesotans felt when they saw Fargo? Nicole Kidman stars in this long-in-the-works movie set in (but only fractionally filmed in) Holland, Michigan, a small, tulip-obsessed town with a lot of Dutch people in it that’s a few dozen miles down the road from where I live and, no, we don’t really talk like THAT, not quite anyway. OK, a few of us kinda distort “windmill” into “windmeal” and “Tuesday” into “Tuesdee,” and there’s plenty of churchgoing around these parts, but the winking, exaggerated Midwest Niceisms of this movie tell us it’s more of a satire than the mystery/thriller it’s being sold to you as. Directed by Mimi Cave (the Sundance/Hulu cannibalism caper Fresh), Holland gets some of the West Michigan kitsch right, but does it have anything compelling to say about idyllic suburban facades? I dunno about that.
The Gist: Yes, Tulip Time is a thing that actually exists, an annual spring festival in Holland, Michigan in praise and worship of the (quick-scans Wikipedia) perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes. I remember visiting Tulip Time for a very wholesome and boring grade-school field trip. And yes, people dress up in little Dutch boy/girl garb, wooden shoes and all, for parades and dances, with kiddie crafts and cover bands and whatnot filling out the family-friendly schedule. Whether Holland is, in the voiced-over words of Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman), “the best place on Earth” – well, that’s highly debatable. She swoons over her perfect life there, going so far as to wonder if it’s even real. Funny that she says that, since her husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and 13-year-old son Harry (Jude Hill) have pieced together a rather immersive and detailed model train set featuring several Holland landmarks, including a giant windmeal as its centerpiece, essentially telling us it’s all fake, bro.
For Nancy, it all starts with a missing earring, “it all” being the crumbling of the facade that we just know is going to happen during this movie. You don’t construct elaborate settings of tulip-choked Midwestern small towns without dynamiting at least a corner of it, y’know. Anyway, missing one single lousy pearl earring mars the perfection of her life: Cheerful optometrist husband, neatly coiffed and dressed and obedient son, quaint home swamped in floral wallpaper, job as a home-ec teacher, Dutch-language prayers over ketchup-caked meatloaf for dinner, etc. One fateful day, Nance – everyone calls her Nance – finds Polaroid film in a box in the garage, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that Fred is having an affair. I mean, they don’t even own a Polaroid camera, so it’s blatantly obvious something’s not right, and she shares her intuitions with Dave Delgado (Gael Garcia Bernal), her shop-teacher coworker who’s new in town, and sticks out a bit because he’s Latino, and isn’t Caucasian to the point that he has a transparent pallor. No, really. The people around here are so White, on a sunny day, you can see their blue veins from across the street.
Nance has been having weird, surreal Holland-centric dreams lately, so she’s feeling unsettled. And if there’s anything suburban movie people hate more than a chipmunk chowing on the tulip bulbs, it’s feeling unsettled. Fred keeps going out of town for optometry conferences and, well, how many optometry conferences are there, anyway? She ropes Dave into helping her on a little after-dark B&E excursion to snoop around Fred’s office in search of clues, and she finds some gently unusual stuff, which in her world is shattering. Meanwhile, the buildup to Tulip Time puts Nance in a PRESSURE COOKER, since few things are more important to suburban movie people than celebrating their boiled-and-blanched heritage in a manner that outsiders – JUST LIKE YOU! – might find hilarious and/or weird. Now, is there actually a problem here, a dark underbelly to Nance’s exquisitely maintained white-picket-fence life, or is she creating one because she’s secretly bored off her boobs and her husband is lousy at making the sex? NO SPOILERS, STROOPWAFFELERS!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Holland is a bit like Fargo if you crossed it with the suburban sheen of Pleasantville and the last movie in which Nicole Kidman played a woman dissatisfied by her husband’s mattress performance, Babygirl.
Performance Worth Watching: This role is all too familiar for Kidman, who played similar trouble-in-paradise roles in Babygirl and 2004’s Stepford Wives remake. But this isn’t to say her work isn’t typically compelling – she’s easily the best thing about Holland, in spite of its so-so screenplay.
Memorable Dialogue: The best colloquial inside joke for West Michiganders is the line, “This isn’t Allegan, it’s Holland!” But one that crosses over to Footloose fans worldwide is as follows:
Harry: Didn’t Pastor Bob say that dancing was the devil?
Nance: Not Dutch dancing, silly! Just all the other kinds.
Sex and Skin: Stage directions: NANCY stares blankly at the ceiling as FRED finishes the deed missionary-style. She sighs, rolls over, closes her eyes, and thinks about DAVE.
Our Take: The Holland script says the quiet part out loud when Nancy confesses, “It’s like carbon monoxide – it’s so sleepy and comfortable, I don’t even know that I’m suffocating.” And if there’s something more frustrating than rendering the subtext as text, it’s flimsy and overwrought critiques of suburbia. Flimsy and overwrought critiques of suburbia that tease a pending twist that arrives too late, and becomes a fulcrum for a shallow paint-by-numbers story instead of a stimulant for something weirder, more surprising or more insightful than a half-realized portrayal of human nastiness inspired by banality.
So Holland feels like a missed opportunity to apply gently barbed satirical comedy – and a few splashes of bright-red corn-syrup blood – to colloquial traditions that outsiders may objectively interpret as being a bit kooky. Cave gets it about two-thirds there before the screenplay’s focus slips into formula and slipshod musings about the nature of reality, and how one’s perception of truth can be warped and distorted when one lives inside a bubble. And we’re left with a nagging feeling that the laughs should be bigger, that Bernal’s character should be written better (he’s central to a racially charged subplot that’s quickly dropped) – and that the film is caught in its own ironic trap by depicting a woman yearning to feel more vital and alive while not following that compulsion itself.
Tonal struggles aside, Cave’s direction is visually inspired, all skewed angles and unsettlingly moody lighting, with surreal flourishes transforming any mention of Tulip Time into something resembling a horror-movie cue. The art direction renders all those blooming tulips and their primary-color bursts an Oz-like quality, cleverly inspiring Nance to be a reverse-Dorothy, compelled to take the Yellow Brick Road the hell out of there. But Holland swerves from tongue-in-cheek comedy to suspense-thriller to nutty-fruitcake melodrama like it doesn’t know what it wants to be, besides ever-so-slightly anti-tulip.
Our Call: Holland is wooden shoes clogging on carpet. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.