As a matter of fact, the high school in Mr. Holland’s Opus, as the titular’s possessive Mr. Holland arrives for his first day, is shown to be in the process of changing over from Grant High School to JFK High. (The actual Ulysses S. Grant High where this was filmed, in Portland, OR, did not change its name to JFK HS. National living legend Beverly Cleary went there.) The name change at the start of Holland’s career honored a national tragedy; by the end of his career, to the students, it’s just another long-dead president like Grant.
- Fanfare for a common man
Holland’s plan was to teach for money and dedicate his summers off to his real passion: composing. Over time, he was saddled with so many responsibilities that his Great American Symphony never got the attention it deserved, and was never even completed. Until, spoiler warning, it was polished up and made ready for its first performance with the retiring Mr. Holland conducting his own Opus. He, a simple public school teacher, is given much fanfare by his appreciative community and former students. The “American Symphony” aspires to be something as soaring and moving as Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for a Common Man. It winds up being all right, but not necessarily worth the wait. The real Opus was the symphony of lives this teacher touched along the way.
- More of an excellent adventure than a bogus journey
The director, Stephen Herek, directed Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure but did not direct Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Also, the path trod by Mr. Holland, in hindsight, turned out to be more excellent than bogus.
- deferments
Holland kept deferring his dreams of composition to free time that rarely appeared, and was increasingly saddled with domestic responsibilities and school extracurriculars, favoring favorite students, and other administrative bullshit. I also wondered how deferments would play into the lives of Holland’s students as the Vietnam War and the Draft loomed in America’s and Mr. Holland’s consciousness. The screenplay writer, Patrick Sheane Duncan, was a Vietnam vet and had himself written and directed a low budget Platoon-as-found-footage movie called 84 Charlie MoPic. I was pretty sure he had some thoughts on 'Nam he wanted to share. It so happened that one of Holland’s promising favorites, a blink-and-you-miss-him Terence Howard, was swept up and blown away in the conflict. “What a waste,” Holland bitterly declared to another minion. How ironic, that young Terence Howard was killed by a want of a draft deferment, when Mr. Holland couldn’t help but keep deferring work on his drafts!
- W.H. Macy
5a. some kind of crossover with Mystery Men?
5b. “W.H. Macy” is in the movie, he’s the third character with dialogue.
This is the part of William H. Macy’s career when previous show biz professionals with the same name meant that he couldn’t exactly work under the name he’d most prefer. He hadn’t quite hit on the character actor niche that would make him famous, William H. Macy, character actor, hangdog everyman. For quite a while, including in this movie, he had found work as W.H. Macy, character actor, rule-stickler voice of authority that only finds pleasure in the massive stick up his butt. In this movie, he’s the bottom-line oriented Vice Principal that thinks art and music and stuff are fine, but…
Oh, and as a character actor, he’s demonstrated many styles of hair. You may note many similarities in the haircuts he sported in Mr. Holland’s Opus and Mystery Men. Now that’s the kind of haircut you wear before clocking into your shift at the defense plant, because how else is your wife going to keep meatloaf on the table?
- a couple of lovers’ concertos
Holland’s initial pedagogy in the classroom and orchestra room is to use withering sarcasm and beratement at his dumbass students. That doesn’t seem to work and stresses him out. Eventually he tries something else – he shows how modern day stuff is ripping off the past. For instance, The Toys’ “Lover’s Concerto” (#2 on the U.S. charts)…
sounds an awful lot like the Minuet in G by J.S. Bach (or someone)…
so therefore… gah, you stupid kids, are you appreciating music yet? And they respond favorably to this change in his teaching style!
There are a pair of other lover’s concertos in the movie. The first is the long relationship Holland shares with his wife, who was a trueheart on and off screen. The other one is a kind of skeevy boundary-pushing relationship he develops in 1980. There’s a budding young ingenue who is in desperate need of a supportive father-like figure to praise her, to challenge her, to prod at her buds. And he is just enough into it to make you recheck the movie rating to guess what will happen. Oh, it’s a PG movie?
- It’s an honor just to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor
Holy shit, Richard Dreyfuss was nominated for an Oscar! For this movie! That’s a pretty big deal! He lost to Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, because Dreyfuss sometimes played Holland as prickly, but Cage was an outright prickly pear.
- The implacable grindstone of time
It’s one of those movies that shows how the human spirit thrives or dims when stuck in a decades-long rut. Sometimes you get a real examination of a character’s biography, like The Magnificent Ambersons, The Shawshank Redemption, or It’s A Wonderful Life. Sometimes you get the last few minutes of Zardoz.
- Complaints fall on deaf ears
Mr. Holland has a beautiful boy, which helps mark the passage of time, but how ironic! The young man is profoundly deaf, which means he can never appreciate the thing that Mr. Holland loves most. Or can he?
When I went to college, mp3s were just starting to take off, though Napster hadn’t been invented yet, and our dorm had network file sharing. We could only store so many mp3s due to relative disk drive space. This meant we needed to be judicious in our mp3 collections. You could only keep your favorites, and you wanted to show off your superior music appreciation, too. The cool music you listened to proved that you were also cool. One time I clicked on a kid’s folder to see what mp3s he was sharing. He had some alternative rock and… what was this? Mr. Holland’s Opus Soundtrack - An American Symphony.mp3?
Jesus. It was like going into his dorm room and seeing a poster of “The River Wild” on his wall.
Fine work, Mr. @dtolman. You have the baton.