MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS

 

FOUR STARS – UPLIFTING, POWERFUL

 

 

       When life is done and we look back over the days of our lives, what will we experience as worthy of those days?   What will stand the test of time?  What melody will our lives produce?

       In one of the most beautifully crafted films of a rather ordinary person stumbling upon the answer to such questions, Mr. HOLLAND’S OPUS is a masterpiece.

       Played with a style which allows us to both identify with Mr. Holland’s ambitions and his failures, his loves and his fears,  director Stephen Herek creates a  symphony of public and private themes.

       Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) is a man of worldly ambitions.  As a musician, he seeks the fame and wealth of an admiring public but is providentially unable to achieve it.

       In his “fall-back position” of resorting to teaching music in a local high school, Mr. Holland finds instead a life lived in empowering others.

       With the help of a wise principal (Olympia Dukakis) who counsels him to not only give his students knowledge but also provide them with a compass so they can find their way, Mr. Holland begins to provide such guidance.

        He first reaches out to a tense clarinetist.   When her playing is so poor that she is disrupting the music of his orchestra, he attempts to help her.  But when he focuses only on improving her technical skills, he finds himself powerless.  It is not until he takes time to reach beneath the techniques and come to know her inner frustrations that are blocking her development both as a person and as a musician that he opens her to an entirely new level of confidence and ability.

       In this discovery, that he is there not to do a job, or teach a skill, but to develop the souls of his students, Mr. Holland begins a quest seemingly oblivious to its profound power in the lives of his students.

       We walk with him into the lives of a failing athlete, a cynical intellectual, a combative minority student, and a talented, seductive senior.  In each case, though seemingly unaware and without real insight, we watch as his bumbling way reaches their souls.

       But we not only journey with Mr. Holland through thirty years of teaching, we also travel the road of his private life.

       In spite of having an adoring and supportive wife (Glenne Headly), his family is intrinsically changed with the birth of his son.   Though they name him after their musical heroes, they soon discover that he is deaf.

       This fact that his own son cannot share with him the passion of his life is a powerful theme.  As in the case of most parents who want to pass on their passions to their children only to discover that their children have passions of their own, Mr. Holland is unable to appreciate the unique personhood of his son.

       Unwilling to enter his world and learn sign language, his wife and his son create a bond of communication that leaves him as an outsider in their developing love and lives.

       Seen as an analogy of the coalitions and triangles of dysfunctional family life, his eventual inclusion in their lives is accomplished in a public performance for the deaf in whom Mr. Holland reaches out to his son with both his music and his love.

       At the end of his career, in a premature retirement due to budget decisions, Mr. Holland still does not realize the path he has traveled.  The graduates of his personal school of soul-making secretly come to honor him.

       It is then that we hear the once-bound clarinetist, who is now the governor of the state, proclaim to him that though he wanted fame and riches, and though he wanted to be a famous composer, he has in fact become far richer. 

       With the auditorium filled with his family and students, she proclaims:  “We are your symphony.  We are your notes.  We are the music of your life.  Mr. Holland, we are your opus!”

       In a materialistic world the message of this film is profoundly important:  the only life worth living is the life lived in love and service to others.  Such self-giving love is the fulfillment of the soul.

 

700 words

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