Nicole Kidman's career is running on two tracks: One is her television work on series like Lioness and The Perfect Couple which has been pretty good and the other is her movie work which has been less qualitative with her last film, Babygirl (3/10), being a ridiculous mess and her latest, the Amazon original Holland, being a bland, weird disappointment which I only watched because it is set in Holland, MI, the quaint Dutch town renowned for its annual tulip festival which is on the west side of my home state.
Kidman stars as Nancy Vandergroot, a high school Home Ec teacher married to Fred (Matthew Macfadyen, Succession), an optometrist. They have a 13-year-old son, Harry (Jude Hill, Belfast), who helps his father work on the massive toy train diorama they have in the garage. They have an idyllic life where the worst thing that happens is she wrongly suspects and accuses the babysitter (Rachel Sennott in a 20-second "Why did they cast a big name?" role) of stealing an earring.
Fred frequently travels for conferences and when she discovers a receipt for a place in a town she wasn't aware he was in, she begins to suspect something. When she finds packs of Polaroid film in his toolbox, suspicion rises because they don't have a Polaroid camera. She enlists the school's woodshop teacher, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal, Old), in helping her snoop in his office where she finds a book full of Polaroids, but they're of house details, not kinky sex stuff. Also, these houses that are in his train diorama. Not satisfied, the pair follow Fred when he goes to another conference hoping to catch him in the act.
Now there are a couple obvious paths this story can follow and the "she's imagining things" one is where I thought it'd lead, but where Holland ultimately goes is somewhat bonkers, leading to a spiral of a conclusion where it feels like they made it up the night before they shot it. It's so out of left field & unrealistic that whatever tone they were going for before gets pitched out the window.
The script by Andrew Sodorski also lacks cohesion as Bernal's character is implied, not specified. He tells Nancy he has a past and at one point digs up a gun buried in his backyard, but he never says what his deal is or why he's in Holland. He eats alone in the staff cafeteria and there's a subplot involving a fired abusive alcoholic bus driver and his abused son making a racist attack on him, but what's that about?
Even Nancy's flirting with Dave seems unearned.
Kidman can play these icy Stepford Wife types in her sleep and while she doesn't sleepwalk through her performance, it's mannered and too familiar. She's a producer here, so she imagined something in the material that didn't make it to the screen.
While Michigangsters may enjoy the opportunities to do the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme at the references to Zingerman's and Zehnder's, Holland remains best visited for Tulip Time, but not as a movie.
The HDR10 presentation is colorful and has some bright highlights in spots that remind it's a HDR format, but it's nothing to show off as demo material.
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
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