Louis Sachar’s novel for teenagers, Holes, became a bestseller by word of mouth, building a huge fan base of devotees in the English-speaking world. Among those devotees were the daughter of the chairman of Disney, who persuaded her father to finance the movie, and Sigourney Weaver’s daughter, who encouraged her mom to take a role.
Holes is not quite your usual teen fare. It isn’t a realistic tale with moral lessons to teach on the subjects of drugs or sex; nor is it the kind of out-and-out fantasy that is also huge in that market. It’s an odd combination of the two, which is both its appeal and perhaps the reason why it has been deemed unlikely to be a big success. It has been rather under-sold in the South African market, which is a pity, because it’s very good indeed.
Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBoeuf) is a schoolboy convicted of stealing a pair of shoes donated to a charity auction. In punishment, he is sent to Camp Green Lake, which turns out to be a surreal concentration camp of sorts, where delinquent kids are put to work digging endless holes in the Texan desert for no apparent reason other than that such an activity is character-building. As John Voight, playing the camp supervisor, puts it: “You take a bad boy, make him dig holes all day long in the hot sun – turns him into a good boy.”
But, of course, there is more going on. And here’s where the fantastical (or magic-realist, if you like) element of Sacher’s narrative comes into play. Stanley is in fact the victim of an ancient curse placed on an ancestor of his by a Latvian soothsayer (bizarrely but somehow appropriately played by Eartha Kitt). His travails, and what becomes of him, also have something to do with a long-ago sequence of events involving a female Texan bandit called Kissin’ Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette). The film moves swiftly between the past and the present, and between its different narrative strands, finally tying itself up with the satisfying neatness of an old legend.
LaBoeuf is as good as can be, as is Khleo Thomas as Stanley’s sidekick Zero, and as are the other teen stars. Weaver and Voight go pleasingly over-the-top in their roles, adding to the fun of a tale that is amusing and suspenseful without having to employ any of the usual clichés to be so. One is barely aware that this is a Disney movie, let alone that its director (Andrew Davis) is more famous for action thrillers such as The Fugitive. That the movie turned out as well as it did is a marvel — what, no overbearing formularisation from Disney? No heavy-handed reformulation from Davis? Amazingly, no.
That Holes, by all accounts, is remarkably faithful to its beloved source must have something to do with the fact that Sachar was brought on board to do the script himself, but that can’t be the only reason. It bears all the hallmarks of an unusual project in which all its participants believed whole-heartedly. And what a pleasure that is. Hollywood should try it more often.