Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Powerful

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Richard Dreyfuss, director Stephen Herek and screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan attempt to pull off a cinematic hat-trick with "Mr. Holland's Opus," yet this feat is impossible when none of them appears to know anything about music or high school music bands. Their film is pure sentiment, not existing as anything but a formula nosegay thanks to the built-in nostalgia factor and the 'emotional' score from Michael Kamen. Duncan's script is ostensibly about an indefatigable music teacher and his students, their scattered triumphs and lumpy relationships as seen through many years' time, though Herek turns the proceedings into a recycled lovefest. The picture is certainly well-produced, though the shameless, plastic-coated sincerity with which it was made is nearly enough to sink Dreyfuss' Oscar-nominated lead performance. *1/2 from ****

This movie receives an awful lot of praise and I find that I quite enjoy it as well. It chronicles the life of a music teacher at John F. Kennedy Highschool (arriving after the name was changed from Ulysses Grant Highschool). He came into the school reluctantly because he wanted some time to compose some music but ended getting caught up within the school.Mr Holland's Opus is a movie about shattered dreams and about how what we look to do is not what we end up doing. Holland's dream is to write a symphony but he finds that he is doing too much to get any time to actually dedicate to it. He becomes a teacher and almost immediately after he has a child forcing him to buy a house. To pay off the house he decides to take up summer work which drains even more of his time. Each of these things are unplanned and he finds himself caught up in the affairs of the school for thirty years.He is overjoyed at having a child and dreams of raising this child as a great musician, but once again his dream is shattered when he learns that the child is deaf. As such he begins to isolate himself from his son and embrace his students. He feels that he can not relate to his son because he believes that he cannot appreciate that which he loves. This causes dissension between Holland and his son because of this.Mr Holland's Opus tries to create a real person with dreams, desires, and heartaches and it is a movie about how he confronts these heartaches. Though he finds that he cannot write his own music, he is drawn further into the school wanting to work with the students there. Another shattered dream comes when the jock who he teaches to play the drum is killed in Vietnam. He saw a lot of potential for the boy, especially how he struggled with his incapability to learn only to be killed in a war that nobody wanted. This is contrasted at the time with another student who is so intelligent that he ends up wasting Holland's time. Holland drags him along to a funeral to point out to him a real student who struggled to learn only to have his life struck away from him.In the end Holland feels that he has gained nothing. He is dumped in a budget cut and even though he fought, there was nothing he could do. He walks out of the school thinking that he had done nothing only to walk into the auditorium to be confronted by all of the people that had been through his classes in thirty years and what they had become. It is interesting to see the first girl he worked with, the one who struggled with the oboe walk up as governor of the state. Holland believed that he was a failure but when he looked upon all of the people who he had influenced it struck him that he was not going to be forgotten.This movie shows us that even though we may not have made a huge impact on the world nor have got where we have wanted to, all we need to do is look around at the people we have interacted with to realise that we have made an impact in our own way. Even though we may not have risen to the heights, our close friends will remember us and what we have done for them.

Mr. Holland's Opus is a lovely and engaging film about a musician and composer forced by life to get a 'real job'. The movie skillfully takes place over many decades and is tied together by the music of each generation. Filled with all the emotions and decisions we each must deal with every day, Mr. Holland's Opus explores what it means to have your dreams conflict with your reality with results ranging from frustration to melancholy to joy. Heartfelt without pandering or being overly sappy I think this will appeal to watchers of all ages, especially those who had someone in their life who left an everlasting trace.

The same problem that plagued "Akeelah and the Bee" is present in "Mr. Holland's Opus." The various episodes that occurred through Holland's life are each played with the emotional intensity as appropriate for a climax.Thus, put together, the film is skewed by such a sequence of highly charged emotional "peaks." The result is that the drama's form is thrown off, and instead of a general rise to a climactic plateau, the entire conceit is full of too many peaks.By the time the last scene comes, there's no where to go but to pile on the emotion, straining what intensity there is left to the breaking point. If the scenario had been put together with less routinely occurring crises, it would have helped shape the drama more palatably. As it is, by the end I just wanted to say, "Oh please, no more."Richard Dryfuss puts his all into this effort, and his work is most commendable. It's the writer and director that let him down by not better shaping the film's broad structure. A pity, for this could have been a really significant piece of work set in the public schools.