This movie is so saccharine that it contains a week’s worth of sugar content for the average American. Good thing I’m not looking at movies like this one as an example of cinema qua cinema. Let’s be clear that there’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from it in terms of teaching and learning, either.
One wonders about the motivating factors behind writing a screenplay for a movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus. After a casual watch, it’s clear that Stephen Herek likes his warmed-over ’60s nostalgia as much as he likes hero narratives and cheerleading for music education. Something like American Graffiti, a tepid drama, and The Miracle Worker mashed together. Those pieces don’t fit. There’s too much happening and it takes way too long to happen, which is a dreadful combination.
You’re not here to hear me crab about bad movies, so let’s get to what the movie is saying about or doing with the educational setting. Richard Dreyfuss’ Glenn Holland is of a type: the second-career teacher who thinks the job is a “fall-back position” that he can just walk into. His principal correctly chides him for thinking that way as she walks him to his class on the first day. I’d love to know what the interview process looks like for a position of music director in a public high school. It’s evident that his first passion is music composition and not anything to do with education. He begins his first class with a closed, known-answer question: What is music? The students do not know what you think music is or how you define it—that is why you are there! Give them ideas to consider and then explain to them how to critique those ideas, at a minimum. His principal has a similarly limited view of teaching. She thinks it involves the filling of young minds with information and then giving them a compass to navigate the world. She suggests Holland does not have a compass, but is just filling their heads with information. Fair. I’m reminded of a comment the director of my grad program in teacher training made early in our coursework. We were aspiring high school English teachers in our early 20s. She made it clear that we should not get into teaching high school English if we wanted to share a love of literature, of Shakespeare, with our students because that is not what the daily life of a teacher is about. Her comment was a bit overstated, but it does capture the vision of teaching and learning that Holland holds. He thinks his passion will carry the day with teenagers, at least, at first.
One student in particular provides him with a learning opportunity that he eventually capitalizes on, though it’s not clear whether he applies this learning in later years. Gertrude Lang, a clarinetist in the school’s band, can’t form notes with her instrument without squeaking. He tries to teach her directly with private lessons before school, but her frustration mounts. She is ready to quit the instrument when he tells her that music is more than notes on a page. He knows that she knows the music “in her head, her heart, and her fingers” but needs her to develop the self-trust to perform it fluently. She, of course, excels once he gives her the chance to mediate her thinking by reflecting on what she already knows about her skills. He’s becoming aware that his students’ emotional lives and their motivations matter as much as their “pure music” knowledge.
The other student who we are meant to have feel-good moments about is Louie Russ, one of the only Black characters in the film, and the only one who gets a name. The football coach tells Holland that Russ is academically ineligible for football, but that he could make the wrestling team with the academic credit that Holland’s music class could offer. As the coach tells Holland, Russ has “got nothing else,” so he needs Holland to do this favor. (In return, coach will help Holland’s scrappy group of instrumentalists learn to march in formation so they can perform during football games.) Just so we’re on the same page, it’s 1965 and the only thing a Black student has going for him is sports because he is “not a school kind of person” but he “can work hard.” This is reductive stereotyping at its racist worst. The movie is from 1995, so maybe we are meant to think that these white teachers’ views of this student are retrograde with the passing of 30 years. I don’t think so. When Holland works with Russ, he learns that Russ isn’t able to keep a beat on the drum. In a montage, we see Holland trying to get Russ to clap along with him, tap his feet with him, and bang his drum with him. Here are some of the only moments of physical humiliation in the film. Holland is so fed up with Russ’ lack of progress at toe-tapping that he begins to tap on Russ’ foot forcefully. Is this feedback meant to tell Russ to press down when Holland presses down, or is it meant to tell Russ to stop pressing down and keep his foot still at that moment? I guess his intent is clearer when he grabs the laces of Russ’ Chuck Taylors and jerks his foot up and down in frustration. Worse yet, Holland has Russ don a football helmet while sitting to play his bass drum. Holland then pounds on Russ’ head with a mallet in time with the song. Oh, but it’s OK because “Mr. Russ has found the beat” by the end of the sequence. This result would be heart-warming if it weren’t so revolting. Russ later dies in Vietnam, just to reinforce that he is disposable as a character.
Those moments should have been enough for this film, really. The principal who hired him retires and kisses him goodbye because he’s her favorite. Gross for a few reasons. Then, she gives him a compass, as if it weren’t obvious enough that he has “found his way” as a teacher. Too much. When that scene faded to black, I was glad because I was sure there was nothing more to cover. But, of course it went on. There’s an even more cloying moment still to come when Holland sings and signs JOHN LENNON’s “Beautiful Boy” to his son who has 90 percent hearing loss.
Despite all of the changes Holland and his students have been through over the 30 years of time that the movie encapsulates, the board still eliminates his position along with all of the other art programs at school. Here is where the most real part of the movie happens. A despondent Holland is talking with his football coach teacher friend and he observes that it would be the end of Western civilization if a high school cut its sports budget. His buddy reassures Holland that “they’ll miss [him]” when he’s gone. Holland counters that he feels “expendable.” That’s a succinct summation of what teaching feels like. Some may remember you, or how you made them feel, but you are still a line item on the budget of an institution that cannot love you back, no matter what trinkets it provides you with. A triumphant exit with a supportive crowd at your back does not take away from the fact that teaching is more than just a deeply emotional labor. Recognizing and managing those emotions is necessary, but it is not enough. Beyond respect, teachers deserve much higher levels of the kind of compensation that goes into gas tanks, grocery tills, and mortgage accounts.
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