Mr. Holland's Opus is a 1995 American drama film directed by Stephen Herek, produced by Ted Field, Robert W. Cort, and Michael Nolin, and written by Patrick Sheane Duncan. The film stars Richard Dreyfuss in the title role of Glenn Holland, a high-school music teacher who aspires to write his own composition while struggling with a lack of quality time with his wife and profoundly deaf son.

The film was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. Richard Dreyfuss received nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama and the Academy Award for Best Actor.

In Portland, Oregon in 1965, Glenn Holland is a talented musician and composer who has been relatively successful in the exhausting life of a professional musical performer. However, in an attempt to enjoy more free time with his young wife, Iris, and to enable him to compose a piece of orchestral music, the 30-year-old Holland accepts a teaching position at John F. Kennedy High School.

Unfortunately for Holland, he is soon forced to realize that his position as a music teacher makes him a marginalized figure in the faculty's hierarchy. Many of his colleagues, and some in Kennedy High's administration, including the school's vice principal Gene Wolters, resent Holland and question the value and importance of music education given the school's strained budget. However, he quickly begins to win many of his colleagues over. Holland finds success using rock and roll as a way to make classical music more accessible to his students.

Holland's lack of quality time with Iris becomes problematic when their son Coltrane (Cole) is found to be deaf. He reacts with hostility to the news that he can never teach the joys of music to his own child. Iris willingly learns American Sign Language to communicate with her son, but Holland resists. This causes further estrangement within his family.

As the years progress, Holland grows closer to his students at Kennedy High and more distant from his own son. He addresses a series of challenges created by people who are either hesitant or hostile towards the concept of musical excellence within the walls of the average American high school. He inspires numerous students, but never has private time for himself or his family, delaying the completion of his own orchestral composition. Eventually, he reaches an age when it is too late to have a realistic chance of finding financial backing, or ever having it performed.

In 1995, the adversaries of the Kennedy High music program win a decisive institutional victory. Wolters, now promoted to principal, faces budget cuts from the board of education. He responds by eliminating music, as well as art and drama, from the school curriculum, leading to Holland's early retirement. Holland realizes that his career in music is likely over, thinking that his former students have mostly forgotten him and is dejected at his failure ever to have his composition, which he views as his life's work, performed.

On his final day as a teacher, Holland enters the school auditorium, where his professional life is surprisingly redeemed. Hearing that their beloved teacher is retiring, hundreds of his former students have secretly returned to the school to celebrate his life.

Holland's orchestral piece, never before heard in public, has been put before the musicians by his wife and son. One of his most musically challenged students, Gertrude Lang, now the Governor of Oregon, takes the podium and explains to Holland that the symphony he wrote is not his only legacy: that legacy also includes the people he has inspired and taught, all of the people he has helped to make a better person. Lang then sits among the musicians—drawn from Holland's students over the decades—with her clarinet, but not before asking Holland to step on up on stage and serve as their conductor for the premiere performance of Mr. Holland's Opus ("An American Symphony"). A proud Iris and Cole look on, appreciating the affection and respect that Holland receives. 1

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