OK, friends, sit up straight. Backs up. Instruments high. And a-two, and a-three, and a-…OK, fine, no actual performing required today, but we are in a musical mood thanks to the movie of the week on Mousterpiece Cinema: Mr. Holland’s Opus, starring Richard Dreyfuss as a music teacher in Oregon trying to improve the lives of his students over a three-decade period through an appreciation of the Terpsichorean muse. But is his Glenn Holland actually a good and/or inspirational teacher? Or just kind of a self-involved jackass? The answer isn’t quite so simple, as Gabe and Josh are joined by Kyle Turner of The Balcony to debate the lead character and the film he occupies. Is it more than dramatic irony to have his son be deaf? Is Holland’s off-key performance of “Beautiful Boy” sweet or painful? And how skeevy is the subplot about a student of his harboring a crush on him? Answers to these and more lie within. Check it out!
Listen here!
One thought on “Mousterpiece Cinema, Episode 187: “Mr. Holland’s Opus””
While I enjoyed the discussion, I think you skirted around the
major issue of the film: it’s an exercise in Baby Boomer nostalgia and narcissism. The comments about the soundtrack being
similar to “Forrest Gump” are spot on because it was trying to bring back
memories of just how great music was when Boomers were young. Mr. Holland doesn’t argue about the
timelessness of music, but the timelessness of the Boomers’ music. It’s no mistake that the film skips ahead as
the 80s, the time that Boomers stopped paying attention to contemporary music,
begin. We skip over punk, new wave, hip
hop, etc… and when we end up in the contemporary 1995 landscape we sneer at
stupid children listening to grunge. If
only they hadn’t lost their way because of funding cuts to the arts. Funding cut by Baby Boomers.
Also, in my reading of the performance of Mr. Holland’s “Opus”
we got what he had written in real-time.
I was always impressed that Mr. Holland had a day gig which gave him the
summers off and that’s the most he could accomplish.