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A Folksy Holland Lacks Cohesion

Mimi Cave’s Holland is a movie that can’t really decide what genre it is from scene to scene. I think what it is going for broadly is a fairly Fargo-esque mixture of intense drama with a comic undercurrent in the folksy personalities and tenor of its lead characters. But it actually comes off as the opposite, a largely fluff story with dramatic or dark subjects just in the margins until they very brazenly are not, and you can’t tell what exactly the movie is going for or who it’s even designed to appeal to.
Cave’s previous movie Fresh was much more direct, even with its own wry take on cannibalism -it never seemed so confused as this movie is with its retrograde Midwestern affects, slow tension, messy handling of themes and strange double-bluff play on expectations, where it subverts the story and dynamic it is evidently setting up by negating its own mystery. A thriller that is shot like a comedy, performed like a farce, yet ends like a romance of all things.
Nicole Kidman anchors the mess as a teacher called Nancy in the town of Holland, Michigan some two or three decades ago -a town that true to its name has embraced a very Dutch cultural aesthetic. Her mild-mannered optometrist husband Fred, played by Matthew Macfadyen in exactly the same cadence as on Succession, disappears frequently on apparent work assignments or conferences, to the point she starts to suspect he is having an affair, and in pursuit of solving that mystery herself joins forces with a fellow teacher Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) who harbours a long-gestating infatuation towards her.
It could be argued that Cave does her best in working with this script by Andrew Sodorski, which leaves a lot to be desired on both a character and structural level. Indeed there are a few interesting choices, especially pertaining to the model village that Fred has set up in the basement, the plastic effigy of Nancy that occasionally makes an appearance as symbol of her Norman Rockwell community persona and priorities -that feel a bit off-the-cuff in a way that could be genuinely effective if the story itself weren’t so poorly developed. On the flip-side though, she must bear responsibility for the disjointed tone she is trying to strike. Nancy’s suspicions about Fred’s fidelity can feel like great leaps and she herself comes off as paranoid -not a good impression for a movie that would seem to otherwise endorse believing a woman’s suspicions. Her apparent indoctrination by the community, especially where an important local fair is concerned, doesn’t help matters -and Kidman plays the part as someone alternatively both in and out of control of her own life.
Dave winds up doing a lot more of the investigating, and both in this pursuit and how the character is written more generally as this hapless Midwestern sap, the Coen-like signature bleeds off him in every scene. A very distinct part for Bernal, he plays it pretty well actually, particularly the dopey way he stumbles into a few major twists. But he still feels unmistakably like a device and the mixture of tones he dances around in utterly fail him. He is confronted at one point with a very grisly scene, more disturbing and graphic than anything seen in the movie to that point, and the moment of this realization promptly gives way to a Marx Brothers gag (a very well-composed one at that -if this were a direct comedy it might land perfectly). Macfadyen suffers similarly -playing up this character to his usual strengths but without a framework to make the best use of it. And still the suspicion towards him is relatively dwarfed by the excesses of the other two characters.
Holland, for being the titular setting, doesn’t have much character of its own either beyond the occasional allusions to its old Dutch aesthetics -and this is purely cultural, what we see of the actual town is very generic for its region (the movie was shot on location in Holland and a little bit in Nashville). For a movie ostensibly looking to capture the kind of Scandinavian-style Minnesota nice personality of Fargo, it seems to rely a lot on just presuming such a thing comes across. Lennon Parham plays another local housewife, and she lends about as much colour to the place as the script is capable of generating. And it’s not so much a contrast that you are in any way shocked by the seedy subject matter beneath the pleasant surface.
Closing in on the climax and resolution is where things exponentially flail out of control, as the movie shifts gears quite dramatically into violent territory and pertinent themes that didn’t resonate in a serious way at all leading up to it. Though the truth about Fred is passed off as something shocking, it is really quite mundane in the context of this storytelling; and its consequence, though having the veneer of an incisive point, comes across rather as a hashing out of a trope the movie hasn't earned the severity of. There's something obnoxious even to its social commentary pretense, its clumsy inference of abuse and trauma -it feels disingenuous from a figure like Kidman and a conscious filmmaker like Cave. And the last critical sequence just plays out really awkwardly too, Kidman feels lost and the momentum never carries, even through the sudden danger to their often forgotten son played by Jude Hill. The movie goes out on a messy and confused note, and even all but forgets about that super important town fair. 
I have to imagine that the town of Holland, Michigan deserves better representation than this. Or at least a better movie bearing their name. This film's mix of identities is chaotic, but not in a thrilling or dynamic way. On the contrary, it is a perplexingly active choice to be so underwhelming. It is much more interesting to actually subvert and make fun of the ‘horror in a quiet village’ theme than to indicate that is what’s being done but then play it out mostly straight anyways. The disappointment in this rings all the more in concert with the pervasive tonal discord, disoriented performances, and the struggling efforts of a director to push through the noise unscathed. Sadly, she doesn't make it.

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