A Life Through Film #011: Mr. Holland's Opus
A movie that tries every trick in the book to get me to hate it and fails
Release Date: 12/29/1995
Weekend on Top: 1/26/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
I didn’t intend to become a Band Kid when I started high school. Granted, I had a few years of experience with the saxophone under my belt by that point, but I had grown tired of the instrument by the time I entered my freshman year. I could have used this time as an opportunity to pivot to the visual arts, something I had never excelled in (did you know you can get a C in second grade art class?). Instead, I decided my existing ability to read music and keep rhythm would give me a leg up in Beginning Band, so I used the start of high school as an excuse to change from sax to baritone and marimba.
Over the next four years, my various band classes became extreme academic highlights for me. I deepened existing friendships and forged new ones, I developed a love of jazz through learning to play it, and I ended up adding trombone and tuba to my repertoire of instruments. I even joined Pep Band, which allowed me to contribute live music to the home basketball games both my brothers would play in.
It’s tough to say how much of this interest in playing music was within me all along and how much was inspired by our school’s band teacher. But considering that in college I decided to walk away from playing music entirely, I’m going to give a lot of the credit to Ms. Cekola. Though I’m not really much of a musician these days, I don’t think I’d love music so dearly if she hadn’t helped me appreciate the process of learning, making, and playing it. If you’re reading this, thanks for everything, Ms. Cekola!
Maybe my own experiences with high school music classes are why I have a soft spot for this week’s movie. Normally when I see an inspirational teacher movie or a Baby Boomer victory lap congratulating an entire generation for making it to the End of History, I roll my eyes. Both types of film are usually so schmaltzy and unbelievable that it more often feels like navel gazing than actual entertainment.
Why, then, did I enjoy Mr. Holland’s Opus, a movie that is both inspirational teacher film and Baby Boomer victory lap?
Directed by Stephen Herek, Mr. Holland’s Opus covers the 30 year career of its titular character (played by Richard Dreyfuss) as a public high school music teacher. Along the way, he deals with troubled students, an adversarial vice-principal (William H. Macy), budget cuts, the tumult of the mid-20th century, and the struggle of having a son born almost fully deaf. And all the while, he chips away slowly at writing his greatest achievement: a definitive American symphony, written decade over decade over decade.
The origin of Mr. Holland’s Opus comes from screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan having a very annoying day. In 1989, the self-taught script writer was still trying to make it in Hollywood when he had to deal with the already miserable LA traffic made even worse by the teachers and staff of the Los Angeles Unified School District going on strike. These picketing efforts were in protest of poor working conditions and low pay, leading to 20,000 educators walking out for 9 days. In the end, the teachers won: active teachers got a 20% raise, retired teachers got better medical benefits, and responsibilities were divided more evenly amongst educators.
Sitting in nightmare traffic that day though, Duncan was just pissed at the inconvenience. He could have used his anger at the situation to blame the teachers. Instead, he directed his ire at the city for refusing to allocate more budget to education, which he considered a most noble profession (him and me both). The kernel of an idea popped into his head as he sat in his car, and by the time he got home he had worked out the story for Mr. Holland’s Opus in his mind.
Around this same time and in the same city, Stephen Herek’s hard work had paid off, and he was now a successful Hollywood director. After struggling for a few years out of film school as a PA and apprentice editor, Herek finally was able to direct a feature film in 1986 with the alien invasion B-movie Critters. Despite a budget of only $3 million and the obvious whiff of a Gremlins knock-off emanating from it, Critters did quite well for itself, making over $13 million at the box office. The reviews weren’t terrible either; Roger Ebert gave it 3 stars!
[For the record I actually quite like it too. Honestly, I think it’s way better than Gremlins. That movie’s a 2/5, and Critters is a 3.5/5]
In 1989, Herek’s second film as director was released into theaters. You may have heard of it. Cult classic Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a most righteous breakout role for a young Keanu Reeves and perhaps the most late ‘80s piece of media ever recorded. Though it definitely made money, it was not the biggest hit at the box office. Regardless of that though, Bill & Ted has had a shockingly long tail, culturally. It’s spawned two sequels, a TV show, and even more media and merch . Importantly, it’s also a really good movie [3.5/5].
After the success of Bill & Ted, Herek became the go-to director for slightly edgy but ultimately family friendly fare like Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead and The Mighty Ducks, both of which were commercial successes in the early ‘90s. Herek’s films cover a pretty wide gamut of genres, and he admits to being pretty anonymous as a director in terms of style, but his movies made money, so he always had work.
After filming The Three Musketeers for Disney in ‘93, Herek returned home ready for a new project. He looked through a pile of scripts sent in by studios and screenwriters alike, not clicking with any of them. That’s when he found the screenplay for Mr. Holland’s Opus. In an interview years later, Herek said he cried as he read the script, which inspired him to direct the film as a challenge to himself:
I’ve been doing everything for laughs, I’d love to make people cry.
Herek went to the studio, Hollywood Pictures, and told them he wanted to make Mr. Holland’s Opus. The studio was surprised: they had acquired the script some time prior but hadn’t been able to drum up any interest in it. They were about to put the project into turnaround when Herek revitalized it. It was at this point that Herek learned that the script came with a caveat of sorts: Richard Dreyfuss was attached to star.
Richard Dreyfuss? You know, the annoying scientist from Jaws [5/5]? The guy who leaves his family to chase after UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind [also a 5/5]? He was in George Lucas’s second ever movie, American Graffiti [2/5]?
Yeah that guy! What ever happened to him?
Well despite an extremely strong run of movies in the ‘70s capped off by a Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl [3/5], Dreyfuss’s career took a wee bit of a nosedive in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Sure, he was in a few notable highlights like Stand By Me [4.5/5], but never as a leading man. What happened? Did Hollywood conspire against him unfairly for some perceived slight at a powerful producer? Was he turning down good roles a la John Travolta?
Nope! Turns out, Dreyfuss was extremely addicted to cocaine and alcohol during this time. Instead of continuing to challenge himself as an actor, Dreyfuss coasted on his ‘70s success and instead focused on getting as extremely high as possible whenever he could. These habits cost him his marriage, got him into multiple car accidents, and gave him a reputation for being difficult to work with on set. If it sounds like I’m being glib and rude about a man clearly struggling with the demons of addiction, don’t worry, it’s not for no reason.
In 2017, TV writer Jessica Teich accused Dreyfuss of exposing himself to her on the set of a TV special in 1984. Dreyfuss denies Teich’s accusations, but also admits to being so zonked out on blow during that decade that he didn’t remember entire film and TV shoots he was a part of1. The timing of incidents like this and the downturn of his career aren’t a coincidence. Filmmakers knew Dreyfuss was a nightmare to work with, so they didn’t want to work with him.
On top of that, the public turned on him to, albeit for more shallow reasons. Dreyfuss was always really good at playing annoying, neurotic characters, so those kinds of performances made up a lot of his big roles in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When the American audience sees you over and over again as an annoying guy, they start to get annoyed by you. Your movies do worse, and you slip from being a leading man to someone who doesn’t even make the movie’s poster.
By the mid ‘90s, Dreyfuss was ready to make a change. He ditched the cocaine, got married again, and started taking on more acting roles. On top of this, he did some executive producing as well, though the only movie of note he served as EP on is the extremely good Quiz Show in 1994 [4/5]. Dreyfuss wanted to use his ability as an actor and an executive producer to get projects made that aligned with his strong liberal views, so it’s not surprising to me that he hopped onto Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Though the 1989 LA Teacher Strike ended up being a success for the teachers, the ‘80s and ‘90s were difficult decades for public education. A recession in the early ‘80s made many states cut back on their spending for public schools. Simultaneously, a rise in anti tax ideology under Reagan and the spiteful eye of Newt Gingrich meant that many regular citizens were opposed to tax hikes for the express purpose of funding education. At the same time, studies by prominent economist Eric Hanushek were showing that increased per-student spending on education did nothing to improve test scores2, and when combined with a rise in drugs and violence in public schools, many Americans decided that funding education could be a lower priority, politically.
Richard Dreyfuss was seeing stories of school budgets being diminished to the point of entire arts programs being removed and was mad as hell about it. For all his faults, the man understood the value of a well-rounded education for American youth and wanted to bring attention to the value of subjects outside the fields of math and reading. As he told The Oklahoman around the time of the film’s release:
It is an aspect of civic terror and national self-destruction to even contemplate prioritizing the arts as if they are not as worthy as the science, not as worthy as the math.
The story of Glen Holland teaching both music and life lessons over the course of 30 years was exactly what the actor needed to show the value of the arts to the American public. Plus, Dreyfuss was excited by the prospect of being able to challenge himself with the role. “Nobody,” he told the New York Times, “Had ever asked me to play an entire life before.”
You may hear all that and assume that Mr. Holland’s Opus is a saccharine liberal fantasy of a movie, disconnected from reality in its noble pursuits. And to be sure, movies where a teacher comes into one or more troubled students’ lives and helps them to find the way are often treacly and overwrought, at least in my experience with them.
And yet, I buy it here.
I don’t think there’s anything unreasonably pie-in-the-sky in the way Mr. Holland teaches the multiple generations of his music classes. As the movie makes its way from the important and exciting ‘60s to the current year of 1995, we stop in at various points in his career to see the little things that Holland does to make a difference. He isn’t standing in front of legions of children riling them up with monologues of a better future. He instead takes the time to make sure that some students get the help they need to better play and appreciate music.
This works for me better than something like 1988’s Stand and Deliver, one of the more quintessential Teacher as Savior films in our cultural lexicon [people generally like it, but the only time I’ve seen the movie was when I watched a full dub of it for AP Spanish in high school, so some of the quality may have been lost in translation. I’ll just give it a 2.5/5]. In contrast to a new teacher coming into a hostile learning environment and changing the lives of an entire classroom of kids in one school year (like in Stand and Deliver), the arc of Opus feels far more realistic. One teacher learning how to connect with the students who need some extra help and doing little things year on year to improve his craft and promote the art he loves isn’t some messianic figure of education; he’s just a good teacher.
A good teacher, but, as the movie takes care to remind us, not a perfect person. Holland’s obsession with music is so profound that it takes nearly two decades for him to stop resenting his deaf son (Coltrane Gershwin, in case you forgot that this guy is a composer) for being born without the ability to easily appreciate the artform like his father. The disconnect Holland feels between himself and his family as a result of this leads to the worst part of the movie (we’ll get there), where he grapples with why he’s able to teach so many students about music but not the one person who could use that education the most.
Even if I find Holland’s primary character trait of “Loving music” to be a bit exaggerated and annoying at times, Dreyfuss does a great job in the role. He opts to not play the character as an irritating Woody Allen type as he had in some of his previous movies, instead exuding humanity and charm the vast majority of the time. The teaching scenes in the first half of the movie almost always left me with a smile on my face, the interactions between Holland and his students being just too enjoyable. Herek’s goal was to make me cry, but I hope he’ll take a nod and small grin instead.
Dreyfuss also does a good job of convincingly conveying the character across three different decades of life as well. The 60 year old Glen Holland is much different from the 30 year Glen Holland both as a teacher and as a man. I don’t think any extravagant effects were used to show the aging process visually, but Dreyfuss was pushing 50 at the time, a good age to depict the wide swath of middle age that he does in the film.
The progression of the timeline in the movie is a mixed bag thanks to an overreliance on montages (I counted 5 or 6 by the time credits rolled). Even worse, these montages are primarily archival news footage, disconnected wholly from the plot of the movie. If we have to have montages to pass the time more effectively, fine. But to cut away from the characters and setting just so we can see Disco Demolition night and the election of Reagan to denote the end of the ‘70s? Why not just use the evolving fashion and music taste of the students of Kennedy High to represent the same thing?
At the same time though, I am thankful the movie never pulls a Forrest Gump and shows Holland personally encountering every major historical and cultural event of the 20th century. When the real world does interrupt Holland’s life, it makes sense for the character and setting. There’s worry over him using rock and roll to connect to his students. He loses former students in Vietnam. He feels a profound sense of loss at the murder of John Lennon. These are all things that a music teacher working in this time would have to process, so I appreciate the movie slipping them into the plot tastefully.
The focus on the title character and his life does come at the expense of the supporting cast. William H. Macy is wasted as the slightly antagonistic vice principal of Holland’s school, never really amounting to much more than an occasional nuisance. The late Glenne Headly has a few touching moments early on as Iris Holland, Glen’s wife, but after an excellent scene where she breaks down at her inability to communicate with her young son, her already threadbare character is reduced to glorified ASL translator for the second half of the movie.
Another big problem with the movie’s pacing is that some of the challenges Holland faces are given quite a bit of time to play out and evolve, and some aren’t. More than a few times, an obstacle is set up in one scene and framed as a big deal, perhaps something that will earn a mini arc within the film as Holland teaches a student and learns more about himself. But then the issue is resolved a scene or two later, and we’re on to the next part of the movie. It’s never consistent, though.
We can find examples of this at the beginning and end of the film. At first, Holland is bad at teaching his class due to inexperience, so naturally, I anticipated an arc of him learning how to make it as a music teacher. One scene later however, he demonstrates a natural ability to connect with a student on a personal level, and from there it seems like his ability to teach a whole class just falls into place. At the end, we get one scene where we learn that Holland is worried that his life’s work was meaningless because they’re cutting the music program. One scene later, we get the big climax where an auditorium full of his past students validate him and his career, their exuberance towards their old teacher proof of all the lives that he touched. Play his opus. Roll the credits. The ending is a bit reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life, though unlike that movie, the finale of Mr. Holland’s Opus didn’t leave me wracked with sobs [It’s a Wonderful Life is a 5/5].
The absolute nadir of the movie’s pacing issues though has to be the near half hour of the movie where all other plots stop and Holland, unable to connect with his wife and son, contemplates having an affair with a student.
Granted, he doesn’t do it. But he really has to think about it! Holland struggles with the option of fleeing town with this 18-year-old for far too long, which is to say he considered it even a little bit at all. Even him showing up at the bus station to turn her down and see her off is extremely inappropriate! And then the movie has the GALL to frame this as the main character making the right decision, something he should be applauded for. No, dipshit! If the man the movie is about is as virtuous as it says he is, there should never even have been a choice in his mind!
This section of the movie is not only gross, it takes up like 30 minutes of the runtime and is single handedly responsible for making Mr. Holland’s Opus too long. The worst part is that it made me realize as I was watching it that the rest of the movie was just made up of mostly unconnected vignettes, and this is the most unconnected and unwieldy vignette of them all.
If the movie absolutely must tempt Holland away with an affair to highlight the disconnect between him and his family, there is absolutely no reason it had to be a student. The character already has a close relationship with the school theater teacher that, in the brief moments we see it, feels pretty emotionally intense. Why not weave the evolution of their connection through multiple parts of the story before Holland is presented with the opportunity to leave his family for this woman who has not only formed a bond with him, but symbolically represents his struggle of balancing his home life with his work? I hate everything about this storyline, and it will knock a full half star off the final score for me.
Despite this, I still ended up enjoying Mr. Holland’s Opus. Like I said, I’ve never been one for the inspirational teacher movie. This is so squarely one of those that I found multiple teacher forums and teacher-penned blog posts calling it the best ever. I should have been rolling my eyes the entire time I was sitting through Mr. Holland’s Opus. And yet I had a small smile on my face during a lot of it instead. Dreyfuss’s performance really is that good, especially when it comes to depicting the little things that a great teacher can do that add up to something profound over the course of years.
Universal Pictures had a similar feeling about that central performance and pushed up the release of the movie to the end of 1995 to qualify it for the big awards shows at the start of the next year. Mr. Holland’s Opus opened in one theater during the New Year’s long weekend, the same day as 12 Monkeys, as Toy Story returned one last time to dominate the weekend box office. Over the next few weeks as the movie spread to more theaters and Dreyfuss’s performance garnered more praise, it began to make more and more money.
Finally, at the end of January and amid a field of bad comedies, intense genre films, and the greatest hits of late ‘95, Mr. Holland’s Opus topped the weekend box office by pulling in $8 million. That’s not the lowest amount of money earned by a box office topper in 1996, but it’s close. Barely a victory, true, but still a victory. I imagine enough people were tired of the gnarly violence of From Dusk Till Dawn and the existential oddness of 12 Monkeys to get to that $8 million, so the studio’s release strategy worked wonders.
Mr. Holland’s Opus got plenty of solid reviews at the time of release; it’s still sitting at a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly and Emanuel Levy of Variety both fell for Dreyfuss’s charm, despite the movie’s well worn tropes and story beats. On the other hand, other reviewers found Mr. Holland empty and soulless, a pastiche of better movies that ultimately says nothing new. Marjorie Baumgarten from The Austin Chronicle opens up her review with one of the most intense burns I’ve ever seen a movie receive (one that I disagree with):
Mr. Holland's Opus is the kind of movie that only a person who really doesn't like movies could love. It's a movie whose grandiose swagger is meant as compensation for its message about the resignation of the human spirit to smaller gratifications and vistas.
Perhaps more importantly than all the critics though, the audiences really loved it. You’ve probably already heard of it, but CinemaScore is a metric that measures filmgoer reactions to movies in major markets as they’re leaving the theater, using those immediate feelings to judge how the general audience will enjoy a given movie. Most movies fall in the B- to A range, but Mr. Holland’s Opus got a rare A+ score, indicating near universal appeal.
Richard Dreyfuss did end up getting that Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He ended up losing though to Nicholas Cage for his role in Leaving Las Vegas.
For a movie that I’d never heard of before researching it for this column, Mr. Holland’s Opus sure made a whole lot of money. After about four months in theaters and with the foreign market added, it ended up making about $106 million on a $31 million budget. Richard Dreyfuss is back, baby!
Except, no, he wasn’t. To look at the filmography of Dreyfuss after 1995 is to see box office bomb after box office bomb for years and years. He’ll appear in movies that this column will cover eventually, but his parts in them are so minor that you’d never catch him on a promotional poster at the multiplex.
Eventually, he began sticking to roles in smaller films and theater, but controversy continued to follow him wherever he went. In 2009, Dreyfuss’s teenage son was allegedly molested right in front of him by Kevin Spacey, then directing a play starring the older Dreyfuss. The star of Mr. Holland’s Opus reportedly did nothing about it.
In more recent years, Dreyfuss has become a vocal critic of Hollywood diversity practices (they “make [him] want to puke”) and, if recent appearances are to be believed, the mere existence of trans people. I don’t want to speculate on the mental health or addictions of a man who clearly has struggled with both for a long time. I’ll just say that I find it sad.
Richard Dreyfuss truly had a hell of a run in the 1970s. He’s a key part of some of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Some careers burn brightly before fading out, and there’s really nothing wrong with that. For one brief moment though, it looked like Drefuss would pull off a Travolta, re-emerging from a troubled ‘80s to a ‘90s filled with promise and acclaim.
The Richard Dreyfuss comeback only lasted for one movie, and everything about it should make me throw it in the bin. A star I don’t like, a concept I find tired, a structure I find annoying. And yet Mr. Holland’s Opus worked for me because of its small charms and solid fundamentals. This is the ideal movie to catch on TV on a lazy Sunday afternoon, especially if you can watch enough of it to really get what the ending goes for. Who knows? Maybe it’ll even make you ready to go to school the next day.
Rating: 3/5
Next Week: The Dump Months of ‘96 continue as we watch a comedy that made me extremely depressed, Black Sheep.
See you then!
-Will
David Bowie made similar excuses when his Thin White Duke character started leaning a little too much into fascistic beliefs. It isn’t a valid excuse, but we did get Station to Station out of that era of his career
The effectiveness of standardized test scores as measures of educational quality has been, to put it lightly, debated for decades now. Teacher groups like the NEA and ACSD argue against their value as a quantitative measure for student intelligence and education quality, and yet over a decade of No Child Left Behind policy made them ubiquitous in American public schools.