I feel personally attacked by the ‘Holland’ movie
Eventually we all become fodder for the Nicole Kidman murder/infidelity content farm.
A shorter version of this piece first appeared here.
At least people from the West Michigan town of Holland know how residents of Fargo, N.D. have felt for the past 30 years. If there is widespread interest in the new Nicole Kidman thriller Holland, now streaming via the Amazon Prime Video platform, we might have to spend the rest of our lives telling people we don’t actually talk like that.
Fortunately, the film has been critically dismissed and seems destined for an undignified burial in the algorithmic-content memory hole. So maybe we needn’t bother observing that Kidman, who is Australian, seems to have gotten as far as the nasalized short “a” and some 1950s alternatives to profanity before abandoning her research into Midwestern speech.
I say “we” because I grew up in the Holland area, and I can assure you the city — with its massive Tulip Time festival, its incessant costumed folk dancing and its oppressive Dutch Protestant ambience — more than warrants a Blue Velvet-style “dark underbelly of suburban America” film treatment. (I’m actually from the adjacent town of Zeeland, which is smaller and somehow even more Dutch.)
Holland, unfortunately, isn’t quite up to that task. It feels more like a standard product of the Nicole Kidman Industrial Complex that happens to include some B-roll footage of windmills and, fittingly, a wooden shoe as a deadly weapon. (Chekhov’s Law states that if an ethnically specific clog appears in the first act of a movie, it must bash somebody’s head in by the third.)
One day she’ll come for your hometown, too
Ever since Kidman’s HBO murder-mystery series Big Little Lies became a sensation in 2017, she has been a prolific creator of quickie book adaptations and direct-to-streaming products with just enough artsy window dressing to obscure the essential sameness of every story. In it, a woman — let’s call her “the Nicole Kidman character” — begins to discover that her peaceful life and comfortable marriage are not what they seem.
Typically this means her husband is a murderer or at least a philanderer. In the case of Holland, it could be both, although the script, by Andrew Sodorski, contains so much misdirection that we don’t know until the final moments what is actually going on — and even then, not really.
Kidman plays a vaguely depressed home-ec teacher named Nancy Vandergroot — because calling her Blondie Van Klompen-Face would have been a little too obvious. She is married to an eye doctor, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), who does a suspicious amount of professional travel for a person in his field. There can’t be an optometrists’ convention in Grand Rapids every weekend, can there?
When the details of his trips start to seem fishy, Nancy enlists a fellow teacher, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), to help her investigate, and over the course of their amateur sleuthing, they consummate a workplace crush. The hypocrisy of investigating a possible affair while engaging in infidelity of her own presents some interesting moral ambiguity — especially in a town not well-known for its permissive attitude regarding the boundaries of traditional marriage — but the film doesn’t stop to smell that particular field of tulips.
The action is set in 2000, although some of the film’s cultural signifiers confuse this chronology. The couple’s adolescent son, Harry (Jude Hill), at one point shows his dad how to play with Pogs, a trend that swept through American middle schools in the early ‘90s, as every Gen X/Millennial cusper surely remembers, and disappeared soon thereafter. Nancy is also shown watching Mrs. Doubtfire in a manner that suggests “these were the times we lived in,” although that movie came out in 1993. (She gasps when the kids figure out that their nanny is also their father, as if this is a massive plot twist and not the entire premise of Mrs. Doubtfire.)
Actually, go ahead and make my culture your costume
The backdrop is Holland’s impending springtime festival, which I had the misfortune of experiencing for several years as a retail worker, musical performer and features reporter, and which is even more surreal than director Mimi Cave presents it. The cinematographer for Holland, Pawel Pogorzelski, is best known for his work with the horror filmmaker Ari Aster, and I could not imagine an artist more qualified to capture the sinister, hallucinatory essence of Tulip Time than the person who shot Midsommar.
However, the potential of this collaboration is never fully realized, since the climactic scene at the festival’s Volksparade is scaled down to an area about the size of a single city block, surely because of budgetary limitations. This would also explain why the film’s producers, after making big promises about shooting in real-life Holland using local landmarks and extras, moved the production to Tennessee, which has a generous film incentive program. Originally titled Holland, Michigan, the movie has been kicking around since 2013, back when Naomi Watts and Bryan Cranston were attached to star and the documentarian Errol Morris had signed on to direct, and when Michigan’s own film tax credits (which were eliminated in 2015) might have kept the project in the state where the story is actually set.
This unusually long gestation period gives the finished film the curious quality of feeling overcooked and underbaked at the same time. The screenwriter reportedly visited Holland once and was inspired to set a darkly comedic murder story there, which checks out. The overbearing cultural references suggest several minutes of Google research on the most visually obvious Netherlands immigrant customs. Not every person in Holland starches their kraplap and says a prayer in Dutch before sitting down to a daily bitterballen lunch, only most of them.
The final product feels like a development-hell casualty that preserved a little bit of its intended creepiness and darkly quirky tone but otherwise feels pasted together out of something longer, more interesting and probably more coherent.
Voiceover monologues by a main character are usually a dead giveaway. Nancy’s opening-credits narration, in addition to inaccurately describing Holland as “the best place on Earth,” alludes to a troubled, possibly traumatic past that preceded her more placid existence in West Michigan, but at no point does the film explain what she’s talking about. Harry is said to have a complicated relationship with his babysitter, as boys his age often do, but after a lone brief scene, the girl (Rachel Sennott) is promptly dismissed and never mentioned again.
It is also suggested the Dave character has a checkered past, but (you’ll notice a pattern here) the specifics are never clarified, and the few cryptic references to his troubles with the law seem written into the script for the sole purpose of supplying a gun — inexplicably buried in his back yard — when the plot demands one.
Now that David Lynch is dead, can we have a moratorium on dream sequences?
Later, the film strongly implies that Dave is really a figment of Nancy’s imagination, Tyler Durden-style. But we see him interact with several other characters in scenes that do not include Nancy. There is one moment where Dave, who is Mexican, has an altercation with some racist white guys, which felt like a sincere attempt to at least acknowledge — if not substantively engage with — a real element of tension that has existed in the city for decades. (West Michigan in general and Holland specifically is home to a large Latino population.) But if Dave isn’t real, how does the same spectral figure exist in the imaginations of the other people who see him? And why did the film give him a dream sequence? What is it supposed to mean if a character who only exists in another character’s mind has a dream? Is the dream actually occurring in a deeper layer of Nancy’s own subconscious?
Meanwhile, toward the end of the movie (spoiler alert), we learn Fred is actually a prolific killer of young women. There is an intriguing, disturbing connection between the lives of his victims and the model train sets Fred methodically constructs in the basement of the family home, but the specifics of his pathology and methods are never fleshed out beyond that. Holland suggests there might be a mystical component to Fred’s evil, although, again, it remains unexplored. So it is unclear, following this reveal, why other people would be having creepy dreams if Fred is the monster, and why Nancy is the one having paranoid visions and always staring vacantly into the distance with a resting serial killer face.
Later, in an utterly pointless closing voiceover, Nancy suggests the whole story might have been a dream, which is a crazy possibility to dangle over the final shot of a film, especially if it doesn’t actually clarify anything. What are we supposed to do with the idea that everything we have seen might not have really happened, when we already know none of it actually did, given that this is a fictional movie? If it was “all a dream,” what was the static reality from which that dream was occurring? Would it mean Nancy was dreaming that she had dreamed Dave’s dreams?
There’s no place like home, thankfully
I am tempted to joke that a person would have to be dreaming to consider Holland “the best place on Earth,” but to each their own. This is a weird thing for Nancy to say, though, not just because I disagree with the factual premise, but because most people don’t describe their own town in such absolute terms. The familiarity a person develops with a place while living there — building a life, participating in commerce, maintaining a home, establishing relationships — inevitably complicates that kind of opinion, or at least it should. Anybody can visit a city and think it looks like paradise, but six months after upending your life to move there, it’s just the place where you live, whether it’s Brooklyn, Paris, Tokyo or Holland goddamn Michigan.
Having diverted happily from the worldview and life path generally espoused there, I could take shots at Holland all day. But it’s also a place where my friends and I hung out anytime we got the itch to do something, and where we got into shenanigans we still joke about today. It’s a place where I learned to play guitar and snuck into movies and performed terribly at my first job. It’s a place where I smoked my weight in ditch weed and consumed ungodly amounts of nicotine and Steak ‘n Shake coffee on school nights. It’s a place where I watched sunsets and got my heart broken.
And it is, I’m surprised to hear myself say, a place that deserved a lot better than Holland.