FEEL-GOOD? NO, FEEL BAD!

By RICHARD CORLISS

BAD MOVIES ALWAYS MAKE ME cry. Isn't that how the old pop song went? For a hundred years, moviemakers of no special talent have known that the simple act of putting a pretty thing in jeopardy--tying Sweet Sue to the railroad tracks, killing off Bambi's mom--will win an audience's hot tears and huzzahs. Sentiment, a human feeling or failing, is honorable; the uses to which it is often put are not. But that is for the individual viewer to judge. If a film touches you, you call it profound. If it has everyone around you sobbing while you remain stony, you call it manipulative. Manipulative is just the word we use when we have caught artists at the parlor trick of making us cry.

So be warned: you will cry while watching Mr. Holland's Opus, directed by Stephen Herek (The Mighty Ducks) and starring Richard Dreyfuss as a music teacher at an Oregon high school. You may be inspired by the movie's Wonderful Life message: that we can do good--help people, enrich lives--in a job we thought was a shoddy compromise with our career dreams. You could leave the dodecaplex feeling better about academe, Hollywood and your own warm, sensitive self. But know this: you should feel bad about feeling good, because Mr. Holland's Opus takes meretricious short cuts to the susceptible heart. It substitutes feel-good panaceas for complex poignancies. It will make a bundle.

Give Dreyfuss points for schlepping this load. Making effective use of his trademark dimple, braying giggle and comic exasperation with a world of slow learners, he takes teacher Glenn Holland through three decades of Americana, from Vietnam to 1995. Holland has a wife (Glenne Headly), a deaf son and, it turns out, a vocation for helping the young understand themselves through music. He becomes their drill sergeant, father confessor, patron saint. As the years pass, his students follow their stars while he, a frustrated composer, pours his ambition into them. It's the ambitious teacher's tragedy: your kids move on, you stay put.

Holland undergoes the same learning process as his pupils. He tries, he becomes frustrated, somebody tells him off, he gets the message and feels better. This is the method of nearly every scene in Patrick Sheane Duncan's script--as reductive and repetitive as a bad teacher's syllabus. And kids will learn things from Mr. Holland: the connection between Bach's Minuet in G Major and the '60s hit Lover's Concerto, how a white man can teach natural rhythm to a black athlete, the sign-language symbol for asshole. But mostly they will learn that films avoid the problems they pretend to confront. This one is a 2-hr. 20-min. homecoming rally for a musical Mr. Chips.

And as if the plot and acting were not emotionally explicit enough, the dewy score is always there to tell you what to feel. The film is symptomatic of a Hollywood that has forgotten subtlety. The comedies are gross, the thrillers sadistic, the dramas moral tales for preschoolers. At least Mr. Holland gives you some good music (Gershwin, Ray Charles, three Beethoven symphonies) to hum along with while you cry. It's a greatest-hits album, with Kleenex.

--By Richard Corliss