Holes (2003)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: If you forget to come back for Mister Dustaroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity!

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Rating: PG
Director: Andrew Davis
Writers: Louis Sachar
Stars: Shia LeBeouf,
Release Date: April 18, 2003 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 57 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

In Green Lake, Texas, the Yelnats family has been cursed to be unlucky, which they blame on their ancestor Elya’s failure to keep a promise to fortune teller Madame Zeroni over a century earlier in Latvia. One day, Stanley Yelnats IV is wrongfully convicted of stealing a pair of sneakers donated to charity by baseball player Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston, and is sentenced to 18 months of hard labor at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention camp, in lieu of jail time.

The camp is in a dry lake bed where rain never falls and venomous yellow-spotted lizards thrive. Stanley meets warden Louise Walker, her assistant Mr. Sir, and counselor Dr. Steve Pendanski. Inmates, nicknamed Zero, Zig-Zag, Armpit, Squid, X-Ray, and Magnet, dig holes daily, earning a day off for any finds that intrigue Louise. After Stanley discovers a golden lipstick tube marked K.B. and a fossil, he is accepted into the group and nicknamed Caveman. When Magnet steals Mr. Sir’s sunflower seeds, Stanley assumes responsibility and is taken to Walker’s cabin. He finds wanted posters there and learns “KB” stands for Katherine “Kissin’ Kate” Barlow, a schoolteacher-turned-outlaw who once robbed a money chest from his great-grandfather Stanley Yelnats Sr. After admonishing Mr. Sir for his report, Louise lets Stanley return to work.

Camp Green Lake’s history is revealed in flashbacks as a flourishing lakeside community in the 19th century. Kate romantically bonds with Sam, an African-American onion merchant who helps repair her schoolhouse. When the wealthy Charles “Trout” Walker discovers the two kissing, he informs the other citizens out of jealousy, and they burn down the schoolhouse and murder Sam. In retaliation, Kate becomes an outlaw, hunting down Trout’s men and earning her nickname by kissing the men she murders. As her legend is established, Green Lake declines due to the lake’s sudden evaporation. Years later, Kate is found by the now-destitute Walkers. Before allowing herself to be lethally bitten by a lizard, she boasts neither Trout nor his descendants will find her buried fortune.

In the present, Steve mocks Zero, whose real name is Hector Zeroni, but Zero injures him and flees. After some deliberation, Stanley searches for Zero. The two have difficulty surviving in the desert without water. Eventually, Stanley carries the ailing Zero up a nearby mountain, and they regain their strength after finding a field of wild onions and a water source. By doing this, Stanley unknowingly fulfills Elya’s promise to Madame Zeroni and breaks his family’s curse. While camping on the mountain, Zero tells Stanley he took Sweet Feet’s sneakers from an auction at a homeless shelter, mistakenly thinking they were a free donation. Zero then threw them over the bridge while evading the police, which led to the shoes inadvertently hitting Stanley’s head.

Returning to the camp, Stanley and Zero investigate the hole where Stanley found the lipstick and uncover a chest before they are discovered by Louise, Mr. Sir, and Steve. They soon figure out that Louise, Trout’s granddaughter, has been using the inmates to find Kate’s treasure. The adults cannot steal the chest from the boys, as the hole is swarming with lizards, which do not bite Stanley and Hector due to the onions they ate earlier. The puzzled adults wait for the lizards to kill the boys. The next morning, the attorney general and Stanley’s lawyer arrive, accompanied by Texas Rangers, and the chest Stanley found is discovered to have once belonged to his namesake great-grandfather. Louise, Mr. Sir, who is actually paroled criminal Marion Sevillo, and Steve, who is impersonating a doctor, are arrested. Stanley and Zero are released, and it rains in Green Lake for the first time in over a century.

The Yelnats family obtains the chest containing jewels, deeds, and promissory notes. They share this with Zero, who uses it to hire private investigators to find his missing mother. Both families live a life of financial ease as neighbors.

The Reiew

Holes is a very well acted movie with an extremely impressive cast. It does a great job of faithfully bringing Louis Sachar’s book of the same name to the big screen. It has some funny moments, some tense emotional moments, and it has a feel good ending that cleverly brings together a lot of independent plot threads in a satisfying way. That said, I hold kids’ stories to a standard wherein I expect them to have a point to teach, or a moral lesson to bring forward. Failing that I expect them to be subject-matter appropriate for a young audience. The trouble I had with the movie – like the book from which it came – is discerning what it was aiming for and what age group it was aimed at.

The story is about Stanley Yelnats IV, a teenage boy with luckless, hapless, but good-natured parents. Stanley (Shia LeBeouf) was in the wrong place at the wrong time, blamed for a shoe-theft crime he did not commit, sentenced to eighteen months in a youth detention center, only to find that the detention center is itself an abusive racket run by a violent warden (Sigourney Weaver), with the help of two underlings (Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson) who operate as her dim-witted henchmen. Stanley’s job at “Camp Greenlake” is to dig one five foot diameter, five foot deep hole every day, in what we come to learn in a multi-generational effort by the Warden’s family to recover a lost treasure. The work is abusive. The kids dig in the midst of extremely venomous spotted lizards, under a brutally hot sun, and with limited water. The criminal kids are not treated well, and they do not treat each other particularly well. Stanley feels compelled to lie to his mother, via letter, about the conditions because he does not want her to worry and because does not believe she could help him anyway.

The story might have benefited from a sense that the kid criminals were in it together, with a healthy amount of camaraderie, but that feeling never really takes hold until the “camp” is finally closed. There is some sense of that, with the giving of nicknames, but they’re nearly all more willing to fight each other than to protect each other, all the way to the end. That’s likely just how real life would work, but it doesn’t make the story easier to endure.

This is relatively heavy stuff but the tone fluctuates from serious to comedic often enough to keep the weight of this injustice from feeling too heavy. However, while Stanley is digging holes, the film gives us the backstory of Stanley’s family, and that of the lake, and it’s not much lighter with respect to substance. Stanley’s family is under what appears to be a century-old Romani / gypsy (the ethnicity is never said outright, but it is implied) curse because Stanley’s great-great grandfather forgot to honor a promise he made to a Madame Zeroni before he left Latvia for America. Ever since that happened, his family has been relentlessly unlucky. This has led to a family tradition of blaming all of their problems on their “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.”

We also learn that the treasure they are digging for was buried by a Wild West female outlaw named Kissin’ Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette) who turned from teacher to outlaw after the man she loved was murdered by a mob for the crime of their relationship being inter-racial and their kissing being witnessed. We see this happen in the film, though not up close, and then we later see a montage of Kate robbing and killing men, but leaving a trademark lip stick kiss on their cheek after they die. One of the men she robs is Stanley’s great grandfather (Stanley Yelnats I), who made a lot of money and moved west to Texas. However, instead of killing him, Kate robs him and leaves him to die in the dried out Greenlake desert. He survived and said somewhat deliriously when he was found that he did so under the shelter of God’s thumb.

Sachar’s book and screenplay do a fun job of bringing all the plot elements together and providing a satisfying ending from a plot standpoint. The curse is lifted. The bad guys get punished. Stanley finds his family’s long lost treasure. Zero gets a share of the treasure and is reunited with his mother. But what’s the lesson for kids with this book?

• Don’t trust the justice system at any level.
• It’s okay to lie to your parents to spare them your paint
• Gypsy curses are real so be careful when negotiating with them
• It’s *cool* to be a murderous outlaw if your good-natured black boyfriend is murdered by 19th century racists. (She’s definitely portrayed as cool.)

All’s well that ends well is fine, but for a story that was definitely aimed at a young audience, it covered so much heavy ground that it’s difficult to actually show this to a young audience. I mean… what’s the right age for a kid to see a 19th century racist lynch mob? What’s the right age to see adults abusing kids? How do you explain to a kid that keeping his suffering a secret is a bad thing? You’ll have to figure that out before you watch the film with a younger person.

The movie still works, for the most part, because Shia LeBeouf does an incredible job of emoting the realities of what Stanley is going through with a cheerful undertone. His performance definitely lets the audience feel some of the weight of his character’s troubled life, but he doesn’t make you carry all of it. There’s something inherently and infectiously good about him that imbues the character (and the audience) with hope where there probably shouldn’t be hope. He does all of this without diminishing his character’s suffering and without resorting to out of place silliness. It’s a really fantastic performance.

I really loved all the other famous actors in this movie, too, who do a lot with little. There were a lot of small roles given to very famous people. Jon Voight’s “Mr. Sir” is played in such a way where you can’t imagine him intentionally hurting one of the kids while at the same time you believe him being surly and petty toward them. His character also has the large challenge of selling to an audience that Sigourney Weaver’s Warden could physically attack him and that he’s too afraid or brow beaten to retaliate. I struggled with the scene in the book wherein the Warden scratched Mr. Sir, because I thought it was hard to father that he wouldn’t get up and seek revenge. Voight painted that picture for him in a way wherein I believed it. I really loved Henry Winkler as Stanley Yelnats III. He was a perfect acting choice for “hapless but good.” Patricia Arquette was great as Kate Barlow, too, selling the soft demeanor having teacher turned murderous outlaw as well as was possible. (The screenplay didn’t really provide a lot of explanation for why she became a full-fledged outlaw.) Eartha Kit played Madame Zeroni. She didn’t do a lot with that role but it was fun to see her in it.

Today, the legacy of this movie is probably a very quick clip from one of it’s flashback scenes, that has become a long-running internet meme. (Language warning.)

On the Hole, I recommend Holes. You’ll want to dig into the plot details before showing this to a younger kid, lest you find yourself buried beneath the weight of some heavy topics and some potentially heavy emotional reactions to those topics. If you feel confident that you’re a ready audience, though, this is a really fun movie to fall into with a lot of great acting and a lot of fun famous acting cameos. It’s a complex story with a lot of independent threads that come together in a very satisfying way at the end. If you enjoyed Shia LeBeouf’s work as a child actor (ex: Disney Channel ‘Even Stevens’), then I think you’ll enjoy him in this film, too.

Have you seen Holes? If so, what did you think?