Deep Dive Disney 2 Year Anniversary Special: Wes Looks at Holes

Welcome one and all to the latest installment of Deep Dive Disney where today we’ll celebrating our two-year anniversary. Yes, it was two years ago this very day that I, a nerdy loser from Connecticut, trying to kill the boredom due to a long period of unemployment thanks to he Covid-19 Pandemic, looking for the next big thing to follow up his Gargoyles retrospective, decided to take a look at a film from my childhood, Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, and analyze it in detail. And thus, Deep Dive Disney was born. Deep Dive DC would come later when I was experiencing Disney fatigue and wanted to broaden my horizons a bit, but that’s another story. Anywho, to decide how to mark the occasion, I put it to my followers on Twitter to suggest whatever they wanted, Disney or otherwise, and then have them vote between the four options I liked best. When all was said and done, you all picked the 2003 adaptation of the 1998 young adult novel by Louis Sachar, Holes. I for one am very happy this movie got picked. Honestly, I was planning on covering it in the very near future anyway, being a huge fan of both the film and the book it was based on. I read the book as a little kid, and found the film to be a mostly faithful adaptation as well as a great film in its own right. So let’s lay out the story, and I suggest you all buckle up and get comfortable because there’s a lot going on in this one. Seriously, this film somehow manages to cram three movies worth of plot into a two hour runtime. Hearing that, you’d think that this movie would be a hot mess, but somehow the film makes it all work. We may as well start at the very beginning, which technically doesn’t happen until about a third of the way into the movie but whatever. Long ago in Latvia, we’re introduced to a man named Elya Yelnats, whose one desire in life was to win the heart of a woman named Myra Menke. However, Myra’s father will only allow his daughter to marry the man who presents him with the fattest pig in the village. Desperate, Elya entreats a local fortune teller named Madame Zeroni for assistance. Madame Zeroni believes that Myra is an idiot and her father a schmuck, but since Elya has his mind made up, she gives him her smallest piglet and tells him that if he carries the pig up a mountain every day and sing to it as it drinks from the stream, then before long, it will be fat enough to present to the father of his would-be-love. However, once he’s done all this, he must then carry Madame Zeroni up the mountain and sing to her as she drinks from the stream. Failure to do so will result in his family being cursed for all eternity. Elya’s pig indeed grows big and fat, but when he presents it to Myra’s father, and Myra lets the decision of who to marry come down to guessing what number she’s thinking of, Elya quickly sours on the whole thing and hops aboard the first boat for America, forgetting to return for Madame Zeroni. Years later, in the old west town of Green Lake Texas, a school mistress named Ms. Katherine falls for a local onion farmer and part-time handyman named Sam. Unfortunately, since this was the old west and Sam the Onion Man was a black guy, they were forced to keep their romance a secret. To make matters worse, racist dickhead and richest man in town, Trout Walker, has the hots for Ms. Katherine, and, when he learns of her love affair with Sam, rounds up a posse and has the onion man killed in cold blood. Overcome with anger and grief, Ms. Katherine turns to a life of crime, becoming the notorious Texas outlaw, Kissin’ Kate Barlow. For years, Barlow robbed banks and stagecoaches all over the west, the secret location of where she stashed her loot, a secret she took with her to her grave. One noteworthy victim of the notorious outlaw was the son of Elya, Stanley Yelnats, named so because Stanley is Yelnats spelled backwards. Finally getting to our actual main story, in present day, we’re introduced to Elya’s Great Great Grandson, Stanley Yelnats the Fourth. It seems that the Yelnats family has had quite a run of rotten luck over the years, blaming all of their misfortune on Elya’s curse. One day, Stanley the Fourth happens upon a pair of sneakers in the street. Since his father is an inventor working on a cure for foot odor and is always looking for new test subjects, the boy decides to bring them home. What young Stanley does not know is that these sneakers were stolen from a Charity drive and were donated by pro baseball all-star Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston. The cops believing Stanley for the theft, the kid is presented with two options, go to juvie or spend eighteen months at Camp Green Lake, a rehibilitation facility for troubled young men. Camp sounds better than prison, so Stanley picks camp Greenlake, This turns out to have been a very bad decision as Camp Green Lake is apparently Hell on Earth. Every day, the kids are forced to go out into the hot sun and dig one deep hole, something the sadistic councilors claim builds character. The campers are to repeat this process until their sentence is served out or, more likely, they die from a heat exposure or a bite from a poisonous lizard. However, Stanley, along with his new best friend Zero, soon learn that there’s more going on at Camp Green Lake than meets the eye, and together they must uncover the secret and fulfill their destinies in the process. I love this movie, I love the book it’s based on, let’s dive right in and look at Holes.

Main Character:

First things first, Stanley is played by Shia LeBeouf in his feature film debut. I think he might have been doing Even Stevens at this point, but I can’t say for sure as I never actually watched that show. In any case, I’m aware that LeBeouf is one of those actors whose presence in a film is reason enough for some to condemn it, but I don’t think that’s fair. I’m actually one of the few people I know who actually liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and I’ve seen the guy in other films that I’ve enjoyed. And even ignoring all of that, I think Shia does a great job in this movie. True, LeBeouf doesn’t look like how Stanley is described in the book (in the book Stanley is described as being overweight and very tall for his age, earning him the nickname Caveman), he still captures the characters good nature as well as the comradery he forms with the other campers during his stay. Stanley is a good kid who just had a run of bad luck that landed him in a bad spot. He spends a lot of the movie in over his head and barely surviving the horrors of Camp Green Lake. Still, he never allows the living nightmare he finds himself in to alter his better nature and we see that he’s a good guy at heart when he agrees to help teach zero to read, something that pays off in a big way at the end. So yeah, I’d say Shia LeBeouf does this character justice.

Villain:

Before we discuss our main villain, The Warden, we should probably talk about her two lackeys, Mr. Sir and Dr. Pendansky. Suffice to say, all three of these characters are spot on from how I imagined them from the book. We’ll start with Mr. Sir, played excellently by Jon Voight. At first I thought they made him up to look like a Dick Tracy villain, but then I remembered he always looks like that. Seriously though, as much as I’m not a fan of Voight as a human being, I have to give credit where it’s due because Voight nails the role of Mr. Sir to a T. He’s a sadistic jackass who probably wouldn’t go out of his way to make things worse for these kids unless they crossed him, but is not above taking pleasure in their misfortune either. The film even included one of my favorite character quirks, that being Mr. Sir’s fixation with his bag of sunflower seeds as a substitute for the cigarettes he’d recently given up. Nice touch.

Much like how Voight knocks it out of the park as Mr. Sir, Tim Blake Nelson likewise nails Dr. Pendanski. Pendanski appears to treat the campers with warmth and understanding, but this is clearly a façade and most of the kids are able to see through it. In reality, Pendanski probably doesn’t care about these kids any more than Mr. Sir does, but at least puts forth the effort to pretend he does, while Mr. Sir doesn’t give two shits.

Finally time for the main event, Warden Louise Walker, later revealed to be the granddaughter of the previously discussed Trout Walker and played by the absolutely brilliant Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver is one of my favorite actresses of all time and while it’s not often that she plays the bad guy, but when she does it’s always magical. Weaver hits that perfect villain balance in which the character is fun to watch, but you never forget that she is an EVIL BITCH! I mean folks, The Warden is a serious piece of work. I mean, she paints her nails with actual snake venom and scratches anyone who displeases her across the face. That is some super villain shit! Every second The Warden is on screen, she exudes evil sexy redneck badass and I am here for every second of it. I may as well reveal the big twist. The whole building character thing is a load of bullshit. Camp Green Lake is actually a front so The Warden and her goons (both of them wanted fugitives whom she’s harboring) can exploit child slave labor to dig for Kate Barlow’s treasure. Her motivations are two-fold. There’s the obvious motivation of greed, but more than that, she’s also a vindictive woman who wants to inflict on innocent children the same suffering she went through when her grandpa forced her to dig for the treasure. So obsessed with the treasure is she, that she'd do anything to get her hands on it, even murder a child in cold blood if she needs to. We’ve covered some seriously loathsome villains here on Deep Dive Disney, but I think we may have finally found the one that takes the cake. Actually, never mind, Frollo is still worse, but The Warden here is definitely up there.

Side Characters:

So we have a lot of characters in this movie, so let’s try and get through them as quickly as possible.

I actually really liked Stanley’s family, especially his dad played by the great Henry “The Fonz” Winkler. I appreciate how despite having endured hardships their entire life, they still are a close knit bunch and face whatever comes their way together as a family.

Going back in time a bit, we absolutely need to talk about Madame Zeroni, played by the legendary Eartha Kitt. Yes sir, the greatest Catwoman, the funniest Disney Villain and all around wonderful human being Eartha Kitt is in this movie and while she has very little screen time, I guarantee you that she’s one of the first things people think of when this movie comes up in conversation. For money, I can listen to Eartha call people schmucks all day and never get tired of it.

Patricia Arquette plays Kissin’ Kate Barlow. All I really have to say about her is, Sexy Texas Gunslinger Patricia Arquette, Thank you Sir, May I have another!

Dule Hill, a few years before he’d become famous as a main character on Psyche plays Sam the Onion Man, and he’s a likable guy. I appreciate that he’s shown to have a passion for what he does and is able to find multiple uses for the onion, be it a tasty snack, a potent medicine or a repellent for the lethal yellow spotted lizards.

Now let’s meet the campers. Something important to note is that the campers are all given nicknames as a sign of acceptance. There’s X-Ray, Armpit, Zig-Zag, Magnet, Squid, Twitch and Zero. With the exception of Zero who we’ll get to shortly, the campers don’t have too much going on. They’re a bunch of thuggish kids but also form a comradery with Stanley over time which is how he earns he nickname “Caveman.” Armpit gets a little more than the others, by which I mean he is given the defining personality trait of, “He Smells Bad.” Now, these kids are working day in and day out in the boiling hot desert sun and their only means of bathing would need a serious overhaul just to barely fit the legal definition of a shower, so all of these kids must smell like seven week old unwashed ass at this point, begging the question: how bad must Armpit smell that these campers are grossed by him. I would like to take a minute to discuss X-Ray, the De Facto leader of the group, whose character development was sadly cut from the film. In the book, we learn that X-Ray puts up a tough front, but in actuality, he’s very self-conscious of the fact he has poor eyesight and isn’t all that smart. Even the name X-Ray is just his real name, Rex, in Pig Latin because that’s all he’s smart enough to come up with.

And finally, we have Zero. Zero is the smallest and youngest of the campers and doesn’t really talk to anyone other than Stanley who he seems to take a liking to. The two strike a bargain. Stanley teaches him how to read and Zero helps him dig his hole. Eventually we learn that Zero was the one who originally stole the sneakers that got Stanley arrested and feels bad for landing Stanley in this position. We also learn that his real name is Hector Zeroni, the Great Great Great Granchild of one Madame Zeroni, something Stanley views as a fated meeting between the two families. When Stanley helps carry Zero up a mountain, much like Elya was supposed to for Madame Zeroni, the fortunes of the Yelnats family immediately start to turn around and in the end, Zero finds his long lost mother and the two families live in comfort for the rest of their days.

Music:

Not much to say music wise. The end credits give us a song where they made Shia LaBeouf try to rap and it’s as cringeworthy as you expect it is. Other than that though, this movie has a pretty solid soundtrack with a lot of great needle drops. My favorite being Honey by Moby playing when we first meet The Warden.

Memorable Scenes:

I love the scene when Stanley is brought into The Warden’s office after getting blamed for stealing Mr. Sir’s sunflower seeds (in actuality, he was taking the fall for Magnet.) It’s here where we learn of The Warden’s penchant for painting her nails with snake venom, which she demonstrates by slashing Mr. Sir across the face for wasting her time.

I also love the scene towards the end of the movie after Stanley and Zero find the treasure. Turns out, since the loot was mostly stolen from Stanley Yelnats the First, then the treasure is the legal property of the Yelnats family. As Stanley, having been found innocent of his crimes, and Zero, whose record of ever having been at the camp were erased after he ran off into the desert, are taken away to freedom, The Warden, now in handcuffs after her evil deeds were discovered, begs Stanley to let her see what’s in the chest, just once. Stanley instead throws her own words back in her face as his way of saying Fuck You. That, was satisfying.

However, my absolute favorite scene in the movie is the death of Kissin’ Kate Barlow. We see her stranded in the middle of the desert, aged and weathered by the years, frying in in the desert heat but feeling nothing but cold. She briefly hallucinates Sam before Trout Walker arrives, his wealth having dried up with the lake years ago, demanding to know where Kate stashed her loot. Kate Barlow, when staring death in the face says that she’s been wishing she was dead for a long time now. And in her final moments, when confronted with the man she hated most, instead of killing him like he did Sam, she instead takes her own life by allowing a yellow spotted lizard to bite her, finally having her vengeance by leaving Trout alone with nothing but an obsession that would drive him, his children and his children’s children mad.

Story:

As I hope I’ve made clear, there’s a lot going on in this movie and in my opinion, it’s not always consistent with it’s themes. However, my takeaway from this film, other than the fact that it is a highly entertaining film and a worthy adaptation of the book it’s based on, is the message of taking responsibility for your own situation. Take the case of the Yelnats family. They blamed their rotten luck on Elya’s curse their entire lives and just kind of resigned themselves to that fate. However, when Stanley stops blaming his bad luck on others and actually puts in the effort to change it, he ends up breaking that curse. Is it the strongest of metaphors, not really, but it’s there if you’re looking for it.

The Dark Disney Factor:

The darkness in this movie is generally spawned from the dire situation the boys find themselves in at Camp Green Lake. This is a place where you could very easily get bitten by instant death lizards. I don’t care if the CGI lizards look terrible even by 2003 standards (seriously this was the same year as Curse of the Black Pearl and that’s the best Disney could do?). They do everything in their power to make Camp Green Lake feel like Hell on Earth. Hell, the first scene features one of the campers with the charming nickname of Barf Bag purposely getting bit by a rattlesnake because dying of snake poison is preferable to the waking nightmare that is Camp Green Lake.

Final Thoughts:

I love this movie. It's a fun story with a solid cast and some memorable moments along the way. I'd highly recommend giving it a watch on Disney+ if you got the time. And that wraps things up. To all who read this, thank you for sticking with this blog for the past two years. This blog has been one of the things keeping me going at some of the worst times and I don't plan on stopping any time soon. And don't worry, there's plenty more to come. See you next time!