Hal Hinson - Style section,
"It almost makes you wanna hurl."

John F. Kelly - Style section,
"Clumsy; cravenly designed to empty our tear ducts."

Glenn Holland is a pianist and amateur composer whose skills are just good enough to ensure that he can eke out a career playing hotel lounges. As the movie begins, he has retreated to his "fallback position": teaching music at Oregon's John F. Kennedy High School. His plan is to teach music for four years and compose during the summer. His pedological method mainly consists of reading questions out of the textbook ("What is music?" begins one lackluster example) then berating his students for not knowing the answer.

Thus begins the education of Mr. Holland, as he tries to connect with his pupils: playing rock 'n' roll, spending extra time with an inept clarinet player, helping a football player who's in danger of losing his academic eligibility to literally feel the beat. Before he knows it, Mr. Holland has started down that slippery slope away from his true love. -- John F. Kelly

By John Kelly
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 19, 1996

The last time Richard Dreyfuss tickled the ivories was in "The Competition," the 1980 movie that had him squaring off against opponent and lover Amy Irving. All that time spent learning how to pretend to play the piano didn't go to waste, since he's back at the keyboard in "Mr. Holland's Opus," a make-you-laugh-make-you-cry film about music, teaching and the choices we make as we grow older.

In "Opus," Dreyfuss is Glenn Holland, a pianist and amateur composer whose skills are just good enough to ensure that he can eke out a career playing hotel lounges. As the movie begins, he has retreated to his "fallback position": teaching music at Oregon's John F. Kennedy High School (the year is 1964 and the school has recently been renamed in honor of the slain president). His plan is to teach music for four years and compose during the summer, hopefully completing the symphony we hear him pecking away at throughout the film.

As you'd imagine, this lukewarm commitment to shaping young minds doesn't endear him to either his students or his superiors (Olympia Dukakis as the gruff but lovable principal and W.H. Macy as the suitably weaselly vice principal). His pedological method mainly consists of reading questions out of the textbook ("What is music?" begins one lackluster example) then berating his students for not knowing the answer. No wonder no one appreciates his music appreciation class.

Thus begins the education of Mr. Holland, as Dreyfuss tries to connect with his pupils: playing rock 'n' roll, spending extra time with an inept clarinet player, helping a football player who's in danger of losing his academic eligibility to literally feel the beat.

Meanwhile, Dreyfuss has started down that slippery slope away from his true love. First he's teaching driver's ed to earn extra money; next he's advising the marching band. Before you know it—poof!—30 years have gone by and he still hasn't finished that darn symphony.

There's a poignant and universal theme here: how we gradually make compromises—to pay the rent, to make the mortgage, to afford the baby—until, years later, we're disappointed with who we've become or, rather, who we haven't become. And there's a secondary point that's ably driven home at the movie's end: that the world needs good and thoughtful teachers more than it needs another mediocre orchestral arrangement.

But "Mr. Holland's Opus" is clumsy, as if screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan and director Stephen Herek held their batons in gloved hands. Funny, recurring scenes—the airborne cars of Dreyfuss's driver's ed students—are jarringly intercut with narrative twists cravenly designed to empty our tear ducts: Dreyfuss and wife Glenne Headly have a boy, Cole, who is born deaf. But young Cole doesn't seem like a son, more like a plot device trotted out whenever a point needs to be made. ("Why is every other child more important than your own child?" Headly demands.)

While the movie spans three decades—necessitating the requisite archival-footage musical montages to denote the passage of time, and the application of aging makeup on all the stars—it at least never seems dated. Dreyfuss and Headly's argument about their son's schooling—sign language versus lip-reading—seems plucked from today's education headlines, and the movie includes a not-so-subtle dig at those who would cut funding for arts programs.

At times "Mr. Holland's Opus" is moving. But the sound it produces is that of a clockwork music box, not a great orchestra.

Mr. Holland's Opus (PG) — Contains nothing objectionable.

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 19, 1996

Supposedly, "Mr. Holland's Opus" is about a frustrated composer (Richard Dreyfuss in full-throttle Wilford Brimley mode) who accidentally discovers his true calling as a small-town high school music teacher. What it's really about, though, is preaching to the choir.

A well-intentioned, high-minded, primitively manipulative commercial for arts education funding and increased awareness of the value of art, "Mr. Holland's Opus" is Hollywood moviemaking at its most pontifical. As blandly nonconfrontational as Pachelbel's Canon, the movie celebrates the joys of music, but also the values of sacrifice, frugality, discipline, stick-to-itiveness and hard work. Your basic stuff, in other words, and under most circumstances a pretty sure sale. But screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan and director Stephen Herek appear to be so obsessed with marketing their cultural agenda that the movie becomes a relentless series of in-your-face pitches.

The result is a crudely dramatized, thinly veiled position paper that beats the humanist drum so obnoxiously that you almost begin to root against its platform.

As the mousy Mr. Holland, Dreyfuss couldn't be more jittery and agitated if he were in a horror movie. Standing in front of his orchestra of teenagers, he's so wired that you half-expect him to conduct the group and play the instruments at the same time. He just never lets up. And as his long-suffering spouse, Glenne Headly is around merely to provide wifely support.

Mr. Holland learns many lessons, and so, unfortunately, do we, all of them predigested for us. At first Mr. Holland sees himself as too much of a big shot to devote himself, heart and soul, to a bunch of teenagers. (The story begins just after the Kennedy assassination.) For him, teaching is a fallback—something he can do to earn money while he composes in his "free time." But as he soon learns—mostly from Principal Jacobs (Olympia Dukakis)—there is no such thing as free time for high school teachers.

The sacrifices are not as great as the rewards, however. Ultimately, this stolidly square movie tells us, Mr. Holland learns more than his pupils—about himself, music, how to deal with the disappointments of his son's deafness. As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah.

It almost makes you wanna hurl.

Mr. Holland's Opus is rated PG.