PG | 2 h 23 min | Drama | 1995
Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) dreams of being “famous, rich … probably both” as a big-time composer. Biding his time writing a symphony, he teaches music in a school just to pay the bills, while his wife Iris (Glenne Headly) earns a bit from her photography assignments. Obsessed with listening and being listened to, he’s devastated when their son, Cole (Anthony Natale), is born deaf.
Holland first struggles to teach, the way his students struggle to hit the right notes. Gradually, they learn from each other, and he stumbles upon the real art of teaching. But his bonds at school grow at the expense of bonds at home. Caring for a growing Cole on her own exhausts Iris Holland, and she’s fed up with the increasingly resentful distance between father and son.
Still, school isn’t a breeze. Bureaucratic administrators, no fans of the arts, limit Holland’s impact. Others benefit from it regardless: colleague and football coach Bill Meister (Jay Thomas), students Rowena Morgan (Jean Louisa Kelly), Louis Russ (Damon Whitaker), Gertrude Lang (Alicia Witt), and hundreds of others.
When funding cuts arrive, the arts, considered a luxury, proves an easier target than science or math, which are considered essential. With his symphony on the back-burner, Holland now hurls himself into saving the arts program and his job, but in vain. Just when he thinks that his 30-year career has been for nothing, his students teach him one last thing.
“Opus” (Latin for “composition”) is typically a work of art whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It says something loftier than its components do. Holland’s big lesson? The “free time” he’d hoped for (to spend with his family or compose music) disappears as he gives it away, little by little, to students needing extra lessons. Teaching, he discovers, is a vocation more than a job. And only teachers who also learn along the way become great, not merely good.
Filmmaking Masterclass
Stephen Herek crafts several moving scenes: Lang on the clarinet, Russ on the drum, and Morgan’s vocal performance.Patrick Sheane Duncan’s screenplay bristles with wit. Meister wants Russ (his gifted halfback with low grades) in a marching band, only so Russ can win credits to qualify for football. Holland agrees to help. But Russ has no music sense. OK. Does Russ fancy any instrument? The boy brightens, “Electric guitar!” Understated, Holland smiles, “This is a marching band, the extension cord will kill us.”
Brilliantly, Mr. Dreyfuss portrays a man caught between his passion and his profession, who finds his calling somewhere in between: teaching students that he (and others) found unteachable. Mr. Natale, deaf in real-life, and Headly depict the pain that mother and son feel over fading from Holland’s priorities. And their longing to win him back.
For all their tributes to teachers, Mr. Herek and Mr. Duncan make their point about parents, too. Desperate to communicate with Cole, Holland and Iris start him on sign language. The instructor agrees, but clarifies that only basic training can be outsourced, “The most important teacher your child will ever have is you,” she says to them.
Composing is a deeply individual, even interior, experience. So, when Holland forces himself to learn composing on a teeming campus, his spirit revolts. He’d rather be at his piano, conjuring tunes into existence, willing melodies into being. Teaching pushes him out of, and beyond, himself.
Holland finds one vocation by, largely, losing another, not by hedging his bets. His gift to his students is not just his music (“notes on a page”) but the gift of himself. Learning to respect the glorious, varied tradition of music with its truth and its beauty, they learn to respect themselves and others. Holland finds his art by letting go of it, at least his idea of it. Then, miraculously, art finds him.
