Music of the Heart 1999, Rated PG Buena Vista Home Entertainment

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Starring Meryl Streep, Aidan Quin, et al. Released to DVD on April 25, 2000.

Despite the temptation to classify this movie as Mrs. Holland's Opus, a seemingly viable option given the fact that this film follows the ups and downs in the career of a music teacher, doing so would be a hasty pronouncement. Based on a true story, Meryl Streep stars in Music of the Heart as Roberta Guaspari, a woman recently separated from her adulterous and lecherous husband. Escaping her problems and landing a job, Roberta and her two children move to East Harlem, New York where she begins to teach the disenfranchised urban youth how to play the violin. When budget cuts necessitate the axing of the violin program some years later, Roberta fights back, thus completing the uplifting, over-coming-the-odds portion of Pamela Gray's screenplay. Tender and buoyant of spirit, Music of the Heart suffered slightly from the quick arrival and departures of Aidan Quinn's character, a character who only seemed present only to move Streep's character from one location to another, but this film was enjoyable nonetheless.