oung Stanley Yelnats IV (LaBeouf) believes he has inherited a family curse, brought on by his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather. The curse afflicts all the Yelnats men (who have carried the palindromic moniker Stanley for 100 years). It seems Elya Yelnats forgot to honor a promise to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) in Latvia 200 years earlier. As a result, she said, "You and your family will be cursed for always and eternity."
So Stanley blames the curse when a pair of valuable stolen sneakers lands on his head, landing him in court and resulting in a sentence to Camp Green Lake, a youth facility where there is no green and there is no lake. Instead, there's dust, dirt and a whole lot of holes. The Warden (Weaver) and her lieutenant, Mr. Sir (Voight), believe that the young inmates should dig a hole a day to build character. One hole, five feet deep and five feet wide.
Stanley is thrown together with the other inmates of D Tent, under the eye of Dr. Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson): Armpit (Byron Cotton), X-Ray (Brenden Jefferson), Squid (Jake M. Smith), Magnet (Miguel Castro), Zigzag (Max Kasch) and the silent and diminutive Zero (Thomas). As the new kid, Stanley finds himself with the worst shovel and the least water. But as he slowly wins the trust of his fellow diggers, he finds a few friends and a new nickname: Caveman.
What Stanley doesn't know is that 100 years earlier, when Green Lake still held water, a schoolteacher named Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette) fell in love with an onion seller named Sam (Dulé Hill). But when the town's richest man, Trout Walker (Scott Plank), found out about it, he took action that compelled Kate to change her life. She became the outlaw "Kissin' Kate Barlow." "Kissin' Kate" left a legacy behind that is the reason Stanley and the inmates of D Tent must dig a hole a day, every day.
Holes is deeper than it might at first appear
Adults may not have heard of Holes, but their kids sure have. Austin, Texas, writer Sachar's award-winning youngsters' novel rivals Harry Potter in popularity among the tweener set, and it arrives on screen in an adaptation by Sachar himself.
Sachar has compared his book with Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus and William Goldman's The Princess Bride, and it shares with those classics a quirky sensibility, zigzag storytelling and a bemused magic realism. Like the best of children's lit, Holes details the trials of its teen protagonists with accuracy and without condescension.
Many of those qualities have found their way into the big-screen version of the book, which attracted a starry constellation of big-name talent, as well as an ensemble of gifted young stars, led by newcomer LaBeouf.
Davis, best known for grown-up action adventures such as The Fugitive, has imbued the fantastical story with a gritty realism, and the movie version of Holes plays like a teen Cool Hand Luke by way of Back to the Future III. But Holes finds a voice all its own, and it will likely appeal both to fans of the book and newcomers to Sachar's oddball universe.
Weaver (whose daughter reportedly counseled her mom to take on the role) is suitably malevolent as the Warden who paints her nails with rattlesnake venom, and Voight does a desert-rat variation on his crazed snake hunter from Anaconda. But the real anchors to the movie are LaBeouf (TV's Even Stevens) and Thomas, the hapless boys who find their true destiny at the bottom of a dirt pit.
Sachar's script interweaves its three narratives in surprising ways, though some of the flashbacks seem too abrupt. The Wild-West backstory is especially appealing, and Davis has included a black-and-white silent-film-like montage that heightens the sense of nostalgia.
The movie does have a few problems. At various points, it shifts tones too jarringly: from the Yelnats family's sitcom home life to the grungy reality of the youth camp to the Little House on the Prairie flashbacks of the Old West and to fairy-tale Latvia. Moreover, it is admirable that the movie doesn't shy away from the book's darker moments, but a potential lynching or Zero's imminent death may be too dark for some parents. And the movie wraps up way too neatly at the end.
