A Most Moving Teacher's Film

Rating: 10/10 (5 September 2007)

There are plenty of films about the effect of teacher's over the years on their students. The best known is GOODBYE MR. CHIPS with Robert Donat, but there are others (GOOD MORNING, MISS DOVE, for example). The tragic personal life of the teacher as opposed to his or her dedication to the students is the subject of the drama. Yet the formula works when does well, and MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS was an example of such a successful version.
Richard Dreyfus is Glenn Holland, who has been hired in 1965 to teach music appreciation at JOHN F. KENNEDY HIGH SCHOOL (the principal is Olympia Dukakis, and the vice principal is William H. Macy). Holland's wife (Iris - Glenne Headley) and there child Cole are in a house in the town, and we watch his domestic tragedy - not so much with his wife, but that their son is deaf. Holland concentrates over time on his students, and his constant warfare with the vice principal on matters like rock and roll or the values of music appreciation in learning. Among the students he helps are young athletes trying to accomplish academic achievement, young women trying to break into the field of entertainment or trying to bolster their self-confidence. But he is constantly brought up short by the problems of his relations with his family - especially as his son Cole grows up (Joseph Anderson - age 15 Cole here). Cole is deaf but he is intelligent, and he blows up when Glenn fails to realize that Cole is intelligent about music - a subject he thinks Cole can never share with him.
The running thread through all this is that Glenn began the teaching gig as a money maker while he creates his musical masterpiece - a symphony. But both the home life and the school work take up all his time. Yet, as the film ends he realizes that he did leave an imprint on his students, and he did prove a warm and loving husband and father despite real strains due to Cole's condition. The film ends with a proper validation of his full success.
Dreyfus was wonderful as Glenn (ably supported by Headley, Macy, Dukakis, and Jay Thomas as his friend the sports coach), and got nominated for a second Best Actor Oscar. While he did not win, his career rejuvenated. And he would eventually try (with Thomas) to do a television show in the next decade that dealt with the problems of a teacher in a high school.