GOOD WILL HUNTING
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A twenty-year-old super-genius works
as an anonymous janitor at MIT. He is also into
brawling and getting into trouble with the law. A
parole is arranged on the conditions that he do
mathematics and get a psychological analysis. This
is key to a difficult turn in his life. Ben
Affleck and Mark Damon wrote the screenplay and
play major roles in the film. Gus Van Sant
directs. The character is a little too sharp and
the action a little too dull. Rating: 5 (0 to 10),
low +1 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 18 positive, 1 negative, 1 mixed
Frankly, the film did not do a lot for me. I could not believe the mail character. Goethe was one of the great geniuses in history and he excelled, as opposed to just being good, in only a few fields. The premise of GOOD WILL HUNTING bothered me from the very beginning because it was too difficult to believe that Will Hunting could be as brilliant in as many different fields as the script requires him to be. To have a super-genius of his caliber places this film more in the category of science fiction than that of a believable drama. The premise that there is someone out there of this magnitude of brilliance who has not by the age of 20 come to a lot of people's attention seems unlikely. Here he is working as a custodian at MIT and he can easily beat the best mathematics professors on the faculty. Then he demonstrates he is way ahead of an economics graduate student in that student's own field. This would be hard to believe of someone who spends his full time studying, but Will Hunting (played by Mark Damon) seems to spend very little time in books. Instead he spends most of his spare time drinking with his blue-collar buddies and getting into trouble with the law.
His real genius is discovered by mathematics Professor Lambeau (Stallan Skarsgard), winner of the Fields Medal (the most prestigious award in mathematics). Lambeau gives his classes a prize problem to see if one person can get it over the semester. Janitor Will Hunting solves it with the effort of doing the Times Crossword Puzzle and leaves the answer anonymously on a hallway blackboard.
Lambeau sets a harder problem and Hunting solves it also, but is seen leaving the answer. This gives Lambeau the clue needed to track down the mysterious genius whom he finds conducting his own legal defense after having attacked a police officer. Hunting fails to convince the judge and is sentenced to jail. Lambeau arranges a parole on two conditions: Hunting will undergo analysis and will do math with Lambeau. Once he is discovered, different people fight to understand Will Hunting and to pull him in different directions. For a long stretch there are just four breeds of scene in this film. Hunting carouses and drinks with his rough-playing blue-collar buddies; Hunting does math with Lambeau, proving himself a far better mathematician than anybody on the MIT faculty; Hunting has a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), an English Chemistry student; Hunting has mutually parasitic mind game sessions with his analyst (Robin Williams). The film just goes back and forth among these scenes until Hunting decides how to handle his life.
Hunting's ability to turn psychiatrists into raving animals in minutes seems more modeled on Hannibal Lector than on anything human. It takes many sessions with his analyst before they can talk in anything but sarcastic jabs. The film does a decent job of showing the relationship between Hunting and his lifelong friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck) who really care for each other. The relationship with his girlfriend was OK, but covers well-trodden territory. But Hunting's mind seems really clear only when he is doing mathematics. It is never clear what exactly is going on in Hunting's mind or why he changes in just the ways he does, sometimes playing games and others following the simplest of advice. This is a film with a serious credibility problem and one which stagnates in the middle act. I would give it a 5 on the 0 to 10 and a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Side comment: It is difficult to present someone superbly brilliant in a film without having someone being superbly brilliant to write the script. Damon does a reasonable job playing the troubled super-luminary who has buried himself in a lower-class lifestyle, if any such person has ever existed. The film draws false parallels to Ramanujan and Einstein, neither of whom had Will Hunting's broadband versatility. For what it is worth, this is one of the few film that did a reasonable job of representing higher mathematics. Certainly the they got the facts on the Fields Medal (though they omitted to mention that you have to be young to win the Fields). Ramanujan did not actually work for "many years" with Hardy as stated. He died quite young, probably in large part because of his transplanting from his native climate to England. It was a tremendous loss.
I would have assumed that answers to really difficult problems in combinatorics might involve complex counting arguments and would not fit on a single blackboard, but it is possible. It filmed nicely, but it is unlikely a mathematician would do math with a marking pen on a mirror. It is too easy to accidentally rub off, it does not give enough writing space, and the results are not easily portable or savable. He may have done some scratch-work there, but even that seems unlikely.
It is hard to believe an American mathematician would not know who Ted Kaczynski is.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
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