Just as Disney’s legendary animation department seemed to flail and sputter out its final cinematic whimper this past year (Brother Bear, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?), it’s live action fare offered up a beacon of hope, Eddie Murphy dreck notwithstanding, with such disparate offerings as The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Freaky Friday. To argue the inherent lack of originality contained within these two films seems to miss the point, namely a much warranted return to classical (read: sincere) filmmaking. And perhaps this is no better exhibited than in Disney’s adaptation of Louis Sachar’s Holes, a book only rivaled in reverence by Harry Potter, and a key dealer in this new turn towards relevant, revelatory nostalgia.

It’s difficult not to empathize with Holes’ protagonist Stanley Yelnats IV, even if you weren’t falsely accused of a petty crime as a teen and sentenced to serve time at a juvenile detention facility in Green Lake, Texas (which, true to form, is neither green nor contains a lake). For a story steeped in frontier mythos, tall tales, and wacky coincidence, Holes is remarkably relatable, most directly in its alternately comic and soul-deadening allegorical depiction of the 9 to 5 drudgery most of us are sentenced to when we hit twenty-two. The hallmarks are all here: the taskmaster (Jon Voight’s Mr. Sir, a sunflower-seed-spewing, pompadour-sporting, revolver-toting portrait of abusive power masking complete ineptitude), the double agent (Tim Blake Nelson’s Dr. Pendanski, alternately doting and dismissive of his young charges), and the elusive Big Brother figure (Sigourney Weaver’s Warden, oozing more subtle sadism with each "Excuse me?" than any baddie to inhabit the age of the villainous cackle).

A relatively classical portrait of the bonds of friendship forged in adversity, Holes is in no way saccharine or lacking in whimsy, quite the contrary. Family curses, buried treasure, killer lizards, and medicinal onions are peppered throughout this otherwise conventional fable that spans from early 1800s Latvia to early 1900s Texas to the present. Instead of distancing the spectator from the emotional core of the story, Sachar’s quirkier elements inexplicably cement the film firmly in reality. Because, who among us hasn’t blamed all of life’s problems on our own variation of a “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather” only to find that, in the end, we all make our own luck.

The real shame comes in the form of Tim Burton’s poor man’s knock-off of the same formula, Big Fish, which is so concerned with alternately blurring and fragmenting the line between fact and fiction that it never bothers to actually create characters we can come to care about. They too are fictive, swirling in a cotton candy-colored sphere of “oddness,” when the far more affecting portrayal comes in Holes’ sunbleached, yet disturbingly dark (can anyone even recall the time when Burton was “dark”?), portrait of the trials and triumphs of adolescence and beyond.
—SUZANNE SCOTT