Holes: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

Imagine directing a movie called "Holes" and realizing that if you didn’t dig deep enough, your movie would be a shallow, inconsequential pit. If the irony didn’t kill you, critics and audiences would.

It’s just that situation director Andrew Davis faced when he signed on to adapt Louis Sachar’s popular, 1998 novel, “Holes,” for the big screen.

Considered a modern-day classic by some, the book not only has a built-in audience of millions but it also has won its share of critical success, such as the National Book Award and the prestigious Newbery Medal--honors that might intimidate even the most confident of directors.

Still, taking a cue from Chris Columbus, who directed the Harry Potter films, Davis nevertheless rose to the challenge, working from Sachar’s own screenplay to come through with a winning adaptation, an entertaining, coming-of-age parable that explores issues of race, injustice, tolerance and love without ever once talking down to its intended audience of young people.

In the film, Shia LeBeouf is Stanley Yelnats, a beleaguered Texas teen saddled with chronic bad luck thanks to the curse Madam Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) placed on his family 150 years ago.

Now, like everyone in the Yelnats clan, Stanley’s life is a calamitous wreck, a fact quickly established in the film's opening moments when he’s accused of stealing a pair baseball cleats and is thus sentenced to 18 months at Camp Green Lake, a desert prison camp for juvenile offenders run by the vicious Warden (Sigourney Weaver), the villainous Mr. Sir (John Voight) and the squirrelly Dr. Pedanski (Tim Blake Nelson).

For the ragtag team of boys doing their time at Camp Green lake, each day is met with the unthankful task of standing in the blistering sun while digging a hole precisely 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide.

Why all the digging? The idea is that hard labor builds character, which these boys need. Still, one suspects there are other, more insidious reasons for the digging, which the film explores by reaching into the past. There, in the Old West, answers are found in the ruinous, interracial affair between Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette), a white school teacher, and Sam (Dulé Hill), the black onion dealer who comes to love her.

Big on plot and just as big on character, “Holes” is the rare movie that respects its audience, young and old, which is a surprise since it comes from Davis, whose “Collateral Damage” and “Chain Reaction” did neither. The acting is especially strong, particularly from Voight, who plays Mr. Sir with the sort boozy, menacing leer that suggests his liver is harboring a nest of tequila worms, and also from Weaver, who manages to be sexy and repellent with the mere flip of her unruly hair.

Complex and dark, the storylines crisscrossing each other with the speed of one of Mr. Sir’s bullets, “Holes” is sometimes too dense for its own good and its ending is especially pat, but those are minor pitfalls in a movie that does so many things right, it goes a long way in restoring faith in the Hollywood machine that created it.

Grade: B+