The adventure of digging ‘Holes’

Dennis Piszkiewicz

Going to see a movie intended for kids is a risky business. You may

find yourself sitting through two hours of gratuitous special

effects, precocious child actors, lame plots, gross-out humor and the

always safe but trite message, “Be yourself.”

The movie “Holes” is based on a well-respected book of the same

title by Louis Sachar. My daughter tells me that the book is very

good and that it is very popular with fourth-grade readers. The

movie, I am happy to say, escapes the cliches of the genre and is

likely to be as popular as the book, if not more so.

The central character of “Holes” is Stanley Yelnats, IV, the

fourth in a line of Stanley Yelnats’ who believe that they are doomed

to be losers in life because of a curse put on Stanley’s

great-great-grandfather and his heirs by a fortuneteller. Young

Stanley is arrested -- unjustly, of course -- for stealing a pair of

athletic shoes once owned by a celebrity baseball player. He accepts

an 18-month sentence at Camp Green Lake as his destiny.

The camp, he discovers, is on a dry lakebed surrounded by a

hundred miles of desert in all directions. Its inmates spend their

days digging holes five feet deep and five feet in diameter because,

according to their overseer, Mr. Sir, it builds character. Anybody

can see that they are digging for something that Mr. Sir and the

camp’s warden want. What they find is a story that goes back to a

series of crimes in the old west and to the origin of the Yelnats

family curse.

The film belongs to a half-dozen young actors who play the inmates

of Camp Green Lake, chief among them, Shia LeBeouf as Stanley. They

all appear to be regular kids with individual quirks but with a knack

for getting into trouble that got them sent to camp. The adults play

arrogant and corrupt clowns, as they often do in real life. Jon

Voight is delightfully sleazy as the overseer, and Sigourney Weaver,

as the warden, is as mean as a rattlesnake.

The story is complicated enough that I had to have my daughter

explain a couple of its twists to me after we left the theater. In

its unpretentious way, “Holes” is an epic of good and evil, danger

and adventure. Above all, it is entertaining. Kids may also pick up

something about friendship, loyalty, good character and taking

control of one’s own destiny, which is a bonus.

“Holes” is an engaging adventure that is worth seeing, even if

you’re not a member of the pre-high school set.

* DENNIS PISZKIEWICZ is a Laguna Beach resident.