Nicole Kidman Shines In The Stylish But Hollow Holland
Can you really trust someone with a train set?
On the surface, the titular town of Holland, Michigan, seems beautiful, peaceful, and idyllic. Its windmills, fields of tulips, and pristine Dutch-inspired streets are so picturesque that they look like an amplified Disney ride — perfectly designed, never dirty or broken. Under the surface, however, hides something uglier — not just imperfect, but outright malicious. Maybe it has something to do with how everyone is well-behaved and the kind of people who use religion as an excuse to condemn any art they don't understand, while also cursing like a sailor on the regular. Maybe it's the absolute lack of any person of color except for Gael García Bernal's David Delgado. Then again, maybe it's whatever dark secret Fred, Nancy's (Nicole Kidman) husband, is hiding in his creepy train set.
Nicole Kidman shines in Holland as the home economics teacher who is nearly as devoted to her husband as she is to the tulips festival her whole year revolves around. Kidman plays Nancy with the innocence and gullibility of a child, one that makes increasingly stupid decisions without thinking of even the most obvious consequences. Her suspicions of her husband having an affair lead to Nancy immediately deciding to enlist her work crush, David, to embark on a Rear Window-like journey to find proof of the infidelity while constantly leaving behind proof of her presence in places she isn't supposed to be in. This first half of the film is quite a delight, with Kidman walking a fine line between hurt wife seeking the truth of her husband's many, many, many optometrist conferences, and bored housewife just looking for a thrill ride accompanied by a hot Latino. Though it doesn't exactly fall into physical comedy territory, Kidman does a great job of weaponizing Nancy's sheltered life for comedic purposes.
It helps that Mimi Cave (director of the fantastic Fresh) gives the film a Lynchian look and feel. The more "clues" Nancy seems to gather, the crazier and more surreal her situation becomes. Several dream (or nightmare) sequences aim to keep the audience guessing whether Nancy is crazy or she's actually the only sane person in the town. Midsommar cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and production designer JC Molina lean into the surrealism and the ambiguity of Nancy's mystery, at times shooting Nancy like a tiny figure in a train model set, or legitimately shooting her in a giant model train set to show how stuck Nancy feels in her life and how much of it is controlled by her husband. The impeccable set design in these scenes evokes the similar model scenes in the first Beetlejuice. Complementing the surrealist look and design is a technicolor aesthetic that gives even the non-dream sequences a dream-like quality that emphasizes the nebulous nature of the central mystery and what is real and what isn't.
Holland’s half-baked attempts to tackle the bigotry of close-knit communities goes nowhere.
Though the mystery goes to some admirably wild places — like a third act straight out of Cape Fear — the script by Andrew Sodroski drops the ball when it comes to Nancy's character and most of all, David's. The movie seems to want to say something about secluded, tightly-knit communities and their bigotry against outsiders by adding an element of racism to David's experience in the story. That's all well and good, except the film only goes so far as to have one single isolated incident in which a local drunkard throws things at David's house and yells racial slurs. Immediately after, the subject is dropped and never noted again. That’s not to say that the movie needed to focus on making David's experience a big part of the story, but it comes off as jarring and distracting when it is that one scene that never ties into anything.
There is also the problem with Nancy herself, who grows increasingly irredeemable throughout the movie, willing to ruin the lives of everyone around her without taking responsibility for anything she is trying to get. There's a sense that the script wants to critique white women by making Nancy spineless and unable to make decisions because of her being trapped in specific societal roles. Yet there's no clear intentionality in either the visual framing, or the script, as if it were just dropping breadcrumbs that lead nowhere rather than build up a cohesive theme or character arc.
Still, even if it doesn't exactly work as a whole, there are enough parts of Holland to make it a fun watch. There are thrills, a fun mystery, a great Nicole Kidman performance, and stylish design that overcome the less effective elements of the script.
