Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 28-August-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Mr. Holland's Opus (1995)

My final choice for the "Back-to-School" series turned out to be an unfortunate one, because "Mr. Holland's Opus" is a shameless load of dreck. Being derivative in its badness, however, it does serve to recap the themes that have emerged as I have spotlighted four teacher movies over the past four weeks.

Beginning in 1964, "Mr. Holland's Opus" is the tale of a musician (Richard Dreyfuss) who takes a job at a high school to pay the bills while he pursues his "real" career of composing. He discovers to his surprise that teaching isn't easy and doesn't end at 3:00 p.m., what with students to tutor, papers to grade, and Tuesday night committees in which the principal demands participation. After five tough years during which he starts to get the hang of it, his loving wife (Glenne Headly) presents him with a son, which reinforces his need for steady employment and reduces his personal time even more. Several years later he's asked to take on the marching band ... and then after that the senior revue ... and so it goes to 1995, when Mr. Holland suddenly finds that he has spent 30 years in the classroom and never sold a note, and that his position has just been cut by the school board.

I could fill a nasty paragraph about the "It's a Wonderful Life" perversion of the movie's finale, but it pales in comparison to an earlier scene in which Mr. Holland patches up 16 years of fatherly neglect by singing a John Lennon song to his son. In public. Badly. This scene epitomizes what's wrong with the film: it's overlong, oversappy, and oversimplified. (Also unrealistic: if your dad did that to you when you were a teenager, you'd never speak to him again.) From the moment Holland inspires his first student by telling her to "play the sunset," both his challenges and his triumphs are too facile, obviously scripted for quick emotional payoff rather than slow-building insight into the character. The only chapter of interest involves a student who almost precipitates him into a mid-life crisis (Jean Louisa Kelly), but only because a bit of sleaze would distract from the numbing triteness.

Like the other movies I have studied this month, "Mr. Holland's Opus" portrays its subject as a hero, but it combines with them to reflect our culture's ambivalence toward teachers. "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" dealt with the passing of an age, suggesting that before the modern era a teacher was respected for the tradition and learning he represented. By the 1950s when "Blackboard Jungle" came out, the guy behind the desk had lost the mantle of professional respect and had to fight the hard facts of society to get a modicum of attention. In "Dead Poets Society," the educator was portrayed as a spiritual figure instead of an institutional one, as if he wasn't worth much in his everyday capacity. And here Mr. Holland surrenders his dream for a calling he refuses to acknowledge, and doesn't know others acknowledge, until the very end. These movies suggest that once we stopped regarding teachers as people with special talents who were integral to the community (i.e., stopped bringing them apples for breakfast), we didn't know how to view them. The dichotomous teacher-hero emerged: inherently unglamorous and prone to scorn, drudgery, and budget cuts on the one hand, but elevated by self-sacrifice and an unusual capacity to change lives on the other. As Mr. Holland demonstrates, it's not the talent that matters anymore, it's the determination to do what most other people would not.

These movies never imply that the teacher has business with the world at large — he has no power over the social or political hardships that affect him — but he can earn glory on a small scale, one child at a time. The teacher's life, we're told, isn't easy, and he had better not expect it to be. This is rather a harsh way of looking at one of the most influential professions in our society, but it's comforting that movies like these pay tribute (some better than others) to those who have the courage, foolishness, or idealism to give it a try.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.