Brainless, and therefore unemotional

Rating: 3/10 (21 October 1999)

Our society seems to care much more about sport than about music. Compare the relative prestige of Mr. Dreyfuss and the football coach. Hell will freeze over before the latter will be forced to suffer the indignities of the former. But `Mr. Holland's Opus' is just one more indignity - yet another illustration of our lack of respect towards music.
Mr. Holland's opus - titled `American Symphony', as if no American had ever written a symphony before - is a bare two minutes long. It's also twaddle. Holland has reinforced an ordinary, unchallenging tune with schlocky drum beat as if he's afraid we won't be able to tell where the bar lines fall without help. THIS is what he's been working on all his life? Ten minutes, MINIMUM, is what we should have had to sit through - ten minutes of GOOD music - if the film was going to be at all serious about paying music the kind of respect we pay sport.
It's for this reason we're glad that Mr. Holland gives up his pipe-dream of being a professional composer and in favour of a profession where he might actually do some good; the trouble is, he's not a very good teacher, either. Yes, people are inspired by him, but that's because the script is rigged. Observe:
(1) As his music reveals he has no quality control. His supposedly enlightened appreciation of the Beatles, for instance, carries no weight at all, since he's one of those tiresome people who like everything.
(2) He's forever having stupid ideas. He gives a concert for the deaf - BEFORE political correctness of this kind was fashionable enough to give him some kind of an excuse. He wastes public money on a ludicrous screen of flashing coloured light bulbs that's meant to give deaf people some idea what they're missing ... I mean, really.
(3) He confuses Stravinsky with Shostakovich.
(4) He gives absurd - nay, incomprehensible - advice to students, asking a clarinettist to imagine a sunset and then `play the sunset'. I can imagine the composer bounding into the room and bellowing, `I wrote a SONATA, not a damned sunset.'
The entire movie is just a re-statement of the old chestnut about music being an expression of emotion. Well, that's NOT what music is. Music is an intellectual art. Even the `simple' delight we take in a good tune - not that the film provides us with very many of those - is an intellectual pleasure. And here's the rub: because we are never called upon to use our brains, because the film never shows us the complicated mechanics of REAL musical instruction or music, we can't understand Mr. Holland's emotional involvement to his craft, either.