A movie of shattered dreams, and the influence that you leave on others

Rating: 7/10 (15 October 2013)

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.