There’s a sequence in Megadoc that features Shia LaBeouf talking about the great respect that he has for Jon Voight as an actor, despite their extreme disconnect on politics. I didn’t realize it at that time just how far back their connection went, as I had not yet seen the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, which featured a then-teenaged LaBeouf in the title role of Stanley Yelnats IV, a wrongfully imprisoned child laborer whose adult enemies include overseer Mr. Sir, played by Voight. My blind spot on this topic came up in conversation at a recent post-New Year’s hangout, and I had to admit that although I had grown up reading Sachar’s work (my Scholastic book fair copy of Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was so well loved it eventually fell apart), I had never read or seen Holes. Not only did I not realize that the film was chock full of movie stars, but that the text itself was notably complex, textually intertwined, and much more thoughtful than most fare made for children.
Generations ago in the old country, Stanley Yelnats IV’s great, great-grandfather Elya brought down a curse on his bloodline by failing to deliver on his promised payment to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) that he carry her up a hill to drink from a spring. At the end of the nineteenth century in fertile Green Lake, Texas, the son of the town’s wealthiest man, Trout Walker, is spurned by kind-hearted schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette). When he later discovers that she is in love with Black onion farmer Sam (Dulé Hill), he leads a mob that burns down the school and results in Sam’s death while he is rowing across the lake from his onion farm. Sam’s death seems to curse the town, as it never rains again and the lake dries up. Heartbroken, the former schoolmarm rechristens herself “Kissin’ Kate Barlow” and avenges Sam’s death by becoming an outlaw, eventually robbing a stagecoach occupied by Elya’s son, the first Stanley Yelnats. Stanley survives, but his stories of “taking refuge on God’s thumb” make little sense to his descendants. Kissin’ Kate buries all of her loot somewhere in the salt flats that were once Green Lake and allows herself to die from the bite of a yellow spotted lizard rather than allow Trout Walker to try and torture the location out of her.
A century later, Stanley Yelnats III (Henry Winkler) is trying to create a perfect recipe for foot odor, and his son is overjoyed when a pair of cleats belonging to a major baseball star seem to fall from the sky, but he’s caught with them and the shoes turn out to have been stolen from a charity auction, with young Stanley taking the offer from the judge to go to Camp Green Lake instead of juvenile detention. Once there, he meets his bunk’s “counselor,” “Doctor” Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) as well as the aforementioned Mr. Sir, whose role at the “camp” is unclear other than to be a brute and a bully. He’s also introduced to his fellow inmates and their typical kiddie novel prison nicknames: “Armpit,” “Zig-Zag,” “X-Ray” (Brenden Jefferson), “Magnet,” “Squid,” and most importantly, “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). Each day, the boys are driven a distance from the “camp” to dig a hole, five feet in diameter and just as deep, to “build character,” with the tantalizing promise that if they find anything interesting, they might get the rest of the day off. Despite being the smallest of the inmates by quite a bit, Zero is the fastest digger, and he offers to help Stanley with his hole every day in exchange for teaching Zero to read. When Stanley finds a small metal tube engraved with the initials “K.B.,” he’s bullied into letting X-Ray take the credit, which finally gets Camp Green Lake’s heretofore unseen warden (Sigourney Weaver) out of her house to lead a thorough excavation of everywhere around X-Ray’s hole, indicating that they’re not just digging holes for carceral punishment, but because she’s looking for something out there.
The construction of this little narrative is surprisingly elegant for something made by Disney in the twenty-first century. Most of that intricacy comes as a result of having the novel’s author write the screenplay, which ensured that all of the rich subtext that characterized the Newbery Medal-winning book made it to the screen. All of that plot synopsis above is doled out in beautifully concise increments, with all of the planting of future payoffs feeling completely organic and real. The story of Elya Yelnats is related as if it were no more than a typical family story that playfully scapegoats an ancestor for the clan’s current financial predicaments, and the reveal that Zero’s real name is Hector Zeroni, sharing the last name of the woman whom Elya failed to close the loop with before heading to America, comes late enough in the film that the primarily young audience has probably completely forgotten about her by then. Although the film doesn’t show Trout Walker calling Sam any racist epithets, it doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the dangers to a star-crossed mixed race couple in the 1880s, or the fatal outcome of racist mobbery; the only concession it makes (other than sanitizing its language) is filming Sam’s death at a distance, as Kate stands on the shores of the lake trying to warn him before the peal of a gunshot and Sam’s distant figure collapsing in his rowboat. It’s dark stuff, and the kind of thing it’s hard to imagine a major studio adapting a book with such serious subject matter at such a huge scale in these more mealy-mouthed, faux-progressive times. There’s a mature sincerity about the whole thing that really makes Holes stand out.
I was quite taken with the way that all of the different narratives were eventually braided together into one larger, grander story. Eventually, after one piece of abuse from Dr. Pendanski too many, Zero hits his oppressor in the face with a shovel and runs off into the barren wasteland around Camp Green Lake, prompting the warden to tell her men to get rid of his files since, as a ward of the state, no one will be looking for him after her disappears. After a few days, Stanley takes off after him into the desert, eventually finding him camping out beneath onion man Sam’s overturned boat, where the younger boy has been managing to survive on jars of Kate’s spiced peaches, still preserved there after all this time. It’s from this vantage that Stanley spots a mountain peak that resembles a thumbs up and, recognizing it as “God’s thumb” from his great-grandfather’s survival story, the two of them make their way toward it. Zero almost doesn’t make it, but Stanley carries him the rest of the way to the top, where they discover one of Sam’s onion patches, still thriving, and regain their strength. Just as importantly, Stanley’s rescue of Zero has at last fulfilled the Yelnats family’s responsibility to the Zeronis, lifting their curse. Stanley teaching Zero to read likewise ensures that the latter is able to read the former’s name (or rather, Stanley I’s name) on the trunk that they unearth and keep it from falling into the warden’s hands. With her dying breath, Kate had told Trout that he and his children could dig for a hundred years and never find her treasure, and with the warden’s arrest upon the arrival of the Yelnats’s new lawyer and a couple of Texas Rangers (as it turns out, having a child prisoner with no record of him—Zero’s files were destroyed to cover up his presumed death—is bad news), Trout and his descendants wasted their lives on a treasure they never got to possess. At last, for the first time since Sam’s death, rain comes to Green Lake.
This is an impressive film cinematically as well. The fades between the verdant Green Lake of the past and the dusty plain of the present that is featureless other than its thousands of holes are concise and effective visual storytelling. Zero and Stanley’s ascent of God’s Thumb is very convincing, full of very expensive looking helicopter shots, and it looks fantastic. The locations are, overall, gorgeously photographed, so that even the desolate area around the camp/prison looks beautiful. Never having seen the movie before, I always assumed based on the presence of LaBeouf, who was a Disney Channel sitcom performer at the time, that Holes would be on par with their direct-to-cable original movies, functional and utilitarian rather than thoughtfully arranged and aesthetically interesting. It has some weaknesses of that genre, notably in the film’s soundtrack, which is full of inspirationally titled tracks (“Keepin it Real,” “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” “Don’t Give Up,” etc.) that sometimes literally describe what we’re seeing on the screen, which feels like an over-explanatory narrative crutch for a film that otherwise trusts in its audience’s ability to pick up on nuance and subtlety. This extends to having the young actors perform a mixed hip-hop/pop track that plays over the film’s credits and is, respectfully, embarrassing. I probably saw the music video for it on television at the time of release, and that colored my perception of what I thought the movie was for a couple of decades, so I chalked up the frequent recommendations of it as little more than my peers’ nostalgia. I’m pleased to discover I was wrong.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 