Written by Ryan Arnold

“Mr. Holland’s Opus” turns 30. We take a look back at the successful film, which tells the story of a frustrated composer turned high school music teacher. 

Director Stephen Herek’s movie delves into deeply sentimental territory, but it always does so with sincerity. It unveils the complexities of life while also tugging at one’s heartstrings, and in the end, becomes a real crowd-pleaser.

Clocking in at two hours and 24 minutes, this film’s plot covers a lot of ground – 31 years, to be exact. 

Richard Dreyfuss plays the title role, as Glenn Holland, delivering one of his finest performances of his career, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. 

At the start of the movie, we follow a newly hired 30-year-old Mr. Holland in the year 1964 at John F. Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon. He might be a little hotheaded, but he has a passion for music, and he wants his students to learn and share that same passion he has. 

Throughout Holland’s 30-year teaching career, we also see the changes throughout American society presented as a backdrop to the movie. 

The Vietnam War, in particular, is the most prominent backdrop of this film, as we see one of Mr. Holland’s students, Louis Russ, who is killed in Vietnam after graduating and joining the U.S. Armed Forces. It’s an emotional scene after we saw Holland and Louis’s bond grow earlier in the movie. 

One of the biggest complexities in the film is Mr. Holland’s relationship with his son, Cole, played by three different actors at different stages in his life. Anthony Natale plays Cole at age 28, Joseph Anderson at age 15, and Nicholas John Renner at age six. 

After Cole is born, Mr. Holland and his wife, Iris (Glenne Headly), soon discover that their son is deaf and has 90% hearing loss. As a composer and music teacher, this news crushes Mr. Holland and sadly drives a wedge between his son and himself. Portions of the subplot here become increasingly melodramatic as Mr. Holland appears to be on the verge of giving up on connecting with and helping his son. 

Iris works hard to accommodate her son’s deafness and even learns American Sign Language to communicate with Cole as he gets older. 

One important fact is that every actor in the film who portrayed a deaf person is deaf in real life. 

This casting decision elevates the film’s sincerity, adding a level of realness that’s incredibly impactful to the overall storyline. The 2020 film “Sound of Metal” also used a large number of deaf actors, which was central to the film’s plot. When movies do this, they give an inclusiveness to the stories being portrayed on-screen.

The assassination of John Lennon in 1980 is a turning point for Mr. Holland and Cole’s relationship. Here, the father finally listens to his son and sees Cole’s love for music, just in a different way from his. Mr. Holland finally uses his own life lessons he’s taught his students and applies them to his own life. He is able to grow as a person and finally be a dad to his son, something that should have happened long before Lennon’s tragic passing. 

Of course, a big theme that revolves around this movie is music, and with a music-centered plot, you need a great composer at the helm.

Composer and songwriter Michael Kamen (“Die Hard,” “The Iron Giant” and “Band of Brothers”) gently crafts the ode to Mr. Holland’s life work and achievements on screen. 

Kamen was so inspired after composing the music for this film that he went on to create The Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation in 1996, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing musical instruments to underprivileged students. 

In the end, “Mr. Holland’s Opus” is a sweet movie about the life and career of its fictional character from the 1960s to the 1990s. The ending scene is an emotional solute to Dreyfuss’s character as he is allowed to finally conduct the opus that he’d been working on for 30 years with former students of his. 

I would rate Herek’s sentimental movie, which came out Dec. 29, 1995, as three-and-a-half stars out of five.