Chances are you don't know this, but Louis Sachar's 1998 novel Holes is hotter than Harry Potter in certain middle-school circles. It won a Newbery Medal for Best Children's and Young Adult Fiction in 1999, and, I'm assured by teacher friends, it is actually being read all the way through.
It's one of those rare novels that speaks to a certain age in a certain knowing way, the kind of book you pick up at age 12 and find yourself forever wishing you hadn't read, because now that you've read it you can no longer experience the pleasure of discovering it.
Holes is the Rolling Stones to Harry's Beatles, less fussy, not quite as epic, and not so precious, and that ease gives director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) the license of patience.
His off-kilter adaptation is the latest example of a well-known action director finding new pockets of energy and relevance by making a film for children. With the Spy Kids series, Robert Rodriguez reimagined the special-effects blockbuster through the stream-of-conscious imagination of a grade-schooler. And with Holes, Davis reclaims the kid-friendly message flick - nearly always a pious wasteland for children and parents alike - for kids who act like kids, rather than the savvy tweens of Agent Cody and What a Girl Wants. Holes is messy and jagged, for sure; a bit less than its sum - it's always a disappointment when any movie with a lot on its mind loses its nerve. But at least this is a film with ambition to lose.
Indeed, get this, it turns out to be maybe the first, and last, family movie to draw equal inspiration from Cool Hand Luke and Meatballs, with a dash of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest tossed in for poignancy.
Set against a Texas desert landscape, and populated with sticky, oblong-looking misfits named Squid and Armpit, it's a bona fide prison movie for kids. And not of the benign “If you don't mow the lawn, you know where you're going to end up? In prison, mister!” variety. Camp Green Lake is a juvenile detention center, a movie prison straight out of sun-bleached 1960s counterculture classics where the soundtrack is a metronome of clanging, and one inspirational character always rises up to defy authority.
Authority is personified by a beer-bellied man with a shotgun, a dirty undershirt, and one foot perpetually propped on the runner of his pickup truck. Befitting any movie or book primed to middle-school kids, that age when life first reveals a sadistic fondness for playing unfair, Holes is spiked with Catch 22-ish absurdism: The prison guard is named Mr. Sir, played by Jon Voight with all the aforementioned features, plus a pompadour, a nasty glare, and wolverine-size muttonchops. He seems to have wandered off the set of Pee-wee's Playhouse. As for the prison-yard savoir, there are two: a fuzzy little kid named Zero (Khelo Thomas), a.k.a. the Quiet One, and Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf), the New Guy. (Spell Stanley's last name backwards, and the depth of the film's quirkiness reveals itself.)
Stanley is at the age when irony shrieks like a dog whistle. He is doing 18 months for stealing the sneakers of a famous baseball player. The first irony is that Stanley's father (Henry Winkler) is developing foot-odor-resistant shoes; his house is filled with sneakers. The most glaring irony is that Stanley is an unassuming kid set upon by an unfair world. LaBeouf, a Disney Channel star, is sort of a cross between Screech from Saved by the Bell and a young Dustin Hoffman. He plays Stanley with such internal calm that it's easy at first to mistake his poise as being frightened. He's really just as puzzled as we are about his story.
As Stanley heads to Camp Green Lake, which holds no lake and the sky always seems dust-storm orange, the camera rises high above the prison bus and we see the strangest sight: a desert pocked with holes. Mr. Sir and the chirpy camp doctor (Tim Blake Nelson) make it real plain - the camp's motto is simple: “Put a boy in the hot sun. Teach him to dig a hole. It makes him a better boy.”
Stanley must dig one hole a day, five feet wide by five feet deep. There is, of course, significance to this act that goes beyond the digging. The warden (Sigourney Weaver) is looking for something. So is Stanley, who has to learn how to dig out (sorry) from beneath the shadow of a family curse that ensures the Yelnats remain victims.
Although there's a sense of flattened edges - generic pop plays over panoramas of a parched desert, to jarring effect - Sachar smartly adapted his own novel. He's good at retaining the book's karmic notion that what goes around comes around. The film leaps back and forth between the camp and the Old West, where a schoolmarm (Patricia Arquette) reinvents herself as a dustbowl bandit. Stanley's tale then becomes one of serendipity and poetic justice. It's no secret that the past and present are related. How these lives have pinballed off each other for a century is the secret.
The ending is silly, and the moral is hard to make sense of, but what sticks are those holes. I'm reminded of my favorite book as a child, The Phantom Tollbooth, and its hero, forced to move a pile of sand, one grain at a time. There's nothing scarier when you're 12 than the idea that nothing will ever change.
First Published April 18, 2003, 11:43 a.m.
