Cry, The Beloved Opus
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies Cry, the Beloved Opus By John Podhoretz What makes a movie a sentimental classic? It certainly doesn't have to be an artistic achievement, a work that advances the form. Think of some of...
...But is Mr...
...They are about people trying to behave well despite their weaknesses, to do the right thing in the face of temptation...
...It's by turns subtle (a beautifully rendered relationship between Holland and his most gifted student) and shameless (a deaf son with whom this dedicated musician must somehow find common ground...
...You lose yourself in it, which is, after all, the very feeling that you go to movies to experience...
...Holland's Opus just the cinematic equivalent of a really effective Kodak or McDonald's commercial, one of the ones where a father and a son share a hug, and a tear wells up in America's collective eye...
...It succeeds, and will endure, not because it deploys emotion-churning gimmicks like those commercials, but because it allows its audience to share in the joys and sorrows and triumphs of a man we like and admire...
...it overpowers you...
...Of these, one is an obvious choice: Forrest Gump...
...Holland's Opus is a relatively modest production that did surprisingly good business in its first week of release and made almost the same amount of money the second-a good sign that it has generated great word of mouth and is about to break out as a major hit...
...Holland is and yet how unimaginable it would be to him to indulge himself in such a harmful way...
...Holland is told by a former student, now the governor of Oregon, that "we are all your opus," he weeps and so does everybody watching...
...indeed, all of us remember, or know of, some high-school teacher who could not resist the temptation of adolescent flesh...
...Holland's Opus is going to set some teeth on edge, especially by its philistine dismissal of classical music and an entirely unnecessary and pathetically pompous speech Dreyfuss gives to the local school board...
...It is what links It's a Wonderful Life to Friendly Persuasion, a screwball comedy like It Happened One Night to the uncategorizable Forrest Gump...
...When Mr...
...And it's rare enough to have such an experience that to recapture it, people will see a classic again and again, watch it over and over on television through the years, rent it every few months on video...
...Holland comes face to face with everything he has given up in his life in the person of a young student-singer who wants him to go to New York with her, we don't really doubt that he will stay with his loving wife and son...
...Certainly it is generating enthusiasm of a sort one rarely sees in these parlous moviegoing days, though it's an enthusiasm I don't really share...
...And this, above all, is what classics, whether good ones or bad ones, have in common: They are, in the end, fables about decency...
...Another is Groundhog Day, a clever conceit with Bill Murray as a selfish man forced to live the same day over for years and years until he gets it right-a movie that proved to be the first successful romantic comedy practically since the advent of the sexual revolution...
...What could be more inspiring than the docile, stupid Forrest deciding that he loves the troubled, smart Jenny and sticking mulishly by her until her death...
...These are the American movies from our time that people will be ordering up from video-on-demand 40 or 50 years from now, just as Casablanca and The Philadelphia Story found perpetual life at revival houses on college campuses and in big cities until the VCR killed off the revival house...
...There have been a few genuine cinematic accomplishments this decade-the overwhelming Russian film Burnt by the Sun, maybe Schindler's List...
...Conversation is false, epigrammatic, like a presidential speech laden with self-conscious "soundbites...
...Think of some of the Hollywood perennials- Casablanca, say, or Gone With the Wind...
...Holland's Opus, detailing the 30 years of service of a high-school music teacher (Richard Dreyfuss...
...The struggle to behave well when it is so easy to behave badly-this is the stuff of the movie classic...
...Or they are about selfish people redeemed, made whole, by sacrifice and good works...
...But the girl is wonderfully talented, beautiful, and worshipful, and so this is no easy choice...
...At the climax, when the 60-year-old Mr...
...But only three American movies in recent years will, I think, prove to be sentimental classics...
...Richard Dreyfuss, who gives the performance of his life in the movie, shows us both how torn Mr...
...No matter...
...But as I said, there's no use carping...
...The third is the new Mr...
...At their core, they are as preposterous as any romance novel, featuring tortuous plots and overripe characters...
...But this movie is, like all classics, somehow beyond criticism...
...This movie is going to be with us forever...
...No man is a failure who has friends" is the moral of It's a Wonderful Life, while the selfish stooge at the beginning of Groundhog Day uses his cosmic punishment to become a doctor, a jazz pianist, and an ice sculptor and so win the love of the woman who can set him free...
...Holland's Opus begins jerking tears about 20 minutes in, when a newborn baby gives a yawn on camera, and doesn't let up until the eponymous piece of music concludes it two hours later...
...With a good heart, Forrest Gump and other classic movies tell us, you can accomplish anything...
...Emotions are overdrawn...
...Something remarkable happens when you are watching a classic...
...It compels you to suspend your judgment...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 21
