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Friday, April 18, 2003
'Holes' film is too shallow and dark for its young audiences
Since its 1998 publication, Louis Sachar's Newbery Award-wining novel "Holes" has become widely regarded as one of the most profound and charming young-adult books of all time: an instant classic that tends to clobber even Harry Potter in recent polls of popular children's literature.
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But, though this Disney version was adapted by Sachar himself, it fails to be anything special. It makes passable preteen entertainment but comes off as clunky and heavy-handed in most of the places it should be graceful and enchanting.
The story is about a Texas teenager named Stanley (Shia LaBeouf) from an eccentric family who finds himself unjustly incarcerated in a reform school/work camp run by a Dickensian warden (Sigourney Weaver) and her redneck toady (Jon Voight). The institution is on the edge of a dried lake bed, and ostensibly to "build character" in its young inmates, the warden has them bused into the desert each day, where they're rather mysteriously forced to dig an endless succession of seemingly useless holes.
While it follows Stanley's ordeal in the camp, the movie also flashes back to tell two parallel stories: one involving the imposition of a curse on Stanley's family; the other dealing with a crime that occurred in the Old West and is related to the mystery of the holes.
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| Stanley (Shia LaBeouf) digs a hole in the desert in Disney's morbid film version of Louis Sachar's Newbery award-winning young-adult classic about a boy incarcerated in a work camp. | ||
In Sachar's novel, these three story strands come together in a highly original way to be an exciting adventure, a poignant coming-of-age parable and a wise meditation on history and personal destiny that strikes a unique chord with young readers.
But splashed across the big screen, these same elements do not add up to a similar magic. The plot points are predictable, the characters seem impossibly broad, and the direction has no subtlety. The whole thing plays like one more TV after-school special.
Worse, the film so concentrates on the non-stop cruelty suffered by the young hero that it sends a morbid message. It all ends happily, of course, but not before painting such an ugly view of the world that its PG-rating seems highly questionable.
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