Patron Pick – Holes

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Holes (2003)
Written by Louis Sachar
Directed by Andrew Davis

Shortly after moving to the Netherlands, I started recording myself reading children’s books aloud to my niece and nephew. We started with picture books but have since moved on to some of the shorter chapter books. As a primary school teacher, I loved reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar to my third graders every year. I discovered that book as a child and found the author’s sense of humor aligned with my own, a celebration of dumb jokes and absurdity. After reading that to my niece and nephew, I decided to try Sachar’s most acclaimed book, Holes. I’d never read it before, and it is a well-done middle-grade novel with some intense themes. I had also never watched the film adaptation from 2003. Getting a screenwriter who wasn’t the book’s author might have helped the picture significantly.

Stanley Yelnats (Shia LeBoeuf) arrives at Camp Green Lake after being sentenced to 18 months for stealing a pair of sneakers donated by a famous baseball player to help raise money for a homeless shelter. The thing is, Stanley didn’t steal them; he was walking home from school under an overpass when they fell out of the sky and into his hands. Instead of jail time, he’s been sent to this desolate desert camp where the juvenile offenders are made to dig a hole a day searching for something the camp’s warden (Sigourney Weaver) keeps secret. Aided by her lackeys (Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson), the warden makes the lives of her inmates terrible. Stanley befriends his fellow juveniles, particularly a quiet but serious kid named Zero (Khleo Thomas). We eventually learn that the warden’s buried treasure is directly connected to the ancestors of Stanley & Zero, with your typical sort of happy Disney ending being delivered by the time the end credits roll.

While I liked Holes, the novel, and I am a big fan of Louis Sachar as an author, I found the film to be a massive disappointment. I get that this is some people’s childhood favorite, and I don’t discount that. However, I have to look at it as a piece of film, and it could have been so much better. We often let it slide when entertainment towards children is sloppy and poorly executed, and that is an admission that we don’t respect kids’ intelligence. 

When I taught, we would have a day during the last week of school before summer break, where each 3rd-grade classroom showed a movie for two hours during the day. Students could choose a teacher’s room based on their movie preferences. There was the typical Pixar & Dreamworks Animation fare, but I always tried to pick something a little more challenging than that. I showed Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH one year, another My Neighbor Totoro, and Ponyo in another. Children should have access to well-made art fashioned for them that presents intelligently written stories. Holes are not this, and I was such a letdown.

Part of the problem is how the film delivers the necessary backstory of Stanley’s family and the history of Green Lake. You can’t tell this story without them, but how the flashbacks are incorporated into the film does not work for me. It feels clunky and takes us out of the flow of the story. I’m not saying I know the right way to do it, but what we got was certainly not it. The whole pacing of the movie could be better and makes the already too-long two-hour runtime drag on interminably. You have all this time, yet barely anyone gets strong character development. We get some scenes from the novel recreated along with the expected Disney montages, but I struggled to give a damn about any of these characters. 

Child actors are always potential landmines, and this movie relies heavily on them. LeBeouf is fine, he’d cut his teeth on Even Stevens, but he’s not surrounded by performers who can keep up. It’s likely due to poor direction from Andrew Davis. Davis is responsible for multiple Steven Segal movies as well as the dull Michael Douglas/Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle A Perfect Murder. Yet, he directed The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford, so he could make a good movie. Holes came after several films failed to connect with audiences. This movie should have been a Disney Channel original with a slightly higher-than-average budget. LaBeouf’s presence makes it feel like that is what it was supposed to be until they managed to cast Weaver, Voigt, and Nelson. Now none of those actors was at their peak, but they certainly weren’t showing up on the Disney Channel at this time. So we ended up with this weird, less-than-mid-tier flick. Then even wrangled Patricia Arquette for a few days to play a critical role in the flashbacks. 

I wanted Holes to be so much better than it is. There is a good story here to tell. It just didn’t get told. As an elder millennial, I know this movie was not aimed at me. However, I am deeply interested in children’s literature and its associated entertainment. I liked that Holes tried to be darker than your average kid’s flick, but I won’t pretend it succeeded. While the events of the book play out closely, I never felt the emotional weight of any of it all. I should be a lot more emotional, even for an adult, when Kissin’ Kate Barlow’s story is told, but I felt nothing. The bar was set so low that anyone who grew up to be thoughtful and can remove the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia would revisit this picture and find it lacking.