If you are a Nicole Kidman fan, as I am, you would grab this one with both (clammy) hands.Ms Kidman, I kid you not, has become exceptionally prolific lately. Didn’t she wow us just the other day with her tigress temperament in Babygirl? And wasn’t she smashing in it as a suburban mother and housewife who wants more than what she has in her marriage, and gets much more than she had bargain for?
In Mimi Cave’s avuncular-on-top-twisted-underneath Holland now streaming on Amazon, Ms Kidman plays a kind of bland vapid extension to her character in Babygirl, except that the extra-marital thing in Babygirl was all about kinky sex. This time Ms Kidman’s academic character is more prudish, less adventurous when her character Nancy Vandergroot falls for a fellow teacher Dave (Gael García Bernal). They are cute and in the mood for some naughty fun. Their stolen moments together seem like a harmless diversion. Little do we know! The question is, do we want to know?!
Nancy doesn’t strike me as someone who would play the part of an aggressive homebreaker. But the screenplay by Andrew Sodroski has other plans for Nancy. The unexpected twists in the plot verge on the preposterous. Also, the director, in all her wisdom, uses understatement as a tool of expression even at the most shocking moments of revelation. This incongruity in the conception and execution makes for a highly confounding cocktail of the dainty and the devilish.
Mimi Cave often portrays the Hollanders(this is Holland in Michigan where tulips ka Silsila zaari hai) as quaint, laidback doll cut-outs with no desire for the unsavoury. Hence when the seemingly staid script jumps from adultery to murder, we are expected to feel some kind of a repugnance and shock.
Holland doesn’t allow us to feel anything. Its mood of storytelling is insulated and anaesthetized , not allowing itself to absorb the enormity of the crimes that it addresses, lest it shakes the status quo.
I don’t know if understatement is the best method of narrating a murder mystery. At moments of life-changing revelation, the characters appear to be wrestling with their right to existence.
I don’t know what it is. But something is seriously amiss here. And it’s not the unexpected twists in the characters’ behaviour. It is the express refusal of the screenplay to acknowledge the characters’ discrepancies that leaves the drama denuded of brio.
So yes, in spite of Ms Kidman’s arresting presence, Holland fails to enthral. The supporting actors are forgettable. Matthew Macfadyen who plays her husband with a secret life, reminded me of Kevin Spacey, and what Spacey would have done to the character.
