GOOD WILL HUNTING
A movie review by Joe Barlow
(c) Copyright 1998
STARRING: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver, Stellan Skasgard DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant WRITERS: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck RATED: R (for adult language, violence, and sexual situations) YEAR: 1997 SEEN AT: Park Place 16, Morrisville NC
RATING: **** (out of a possible *****)
True genius must be a hard thing to live with. "Good Will Hunting," the latest film from director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy), explores this concept through the eyes of a twenty year-old who happens to be a mental giant, and is filled with self-loathing because of it.
Matt Damon is Will Hunting, a brilliant young man with absolutely no ambition whatsoever. He surrounds himself with losers, a grungy ratpack which includes his best friend Chuckie (an engaging Ben Affleck). Most of the group's evenings are spent getting drunk and/or looking for fights, two activities they never seem to grow tired of.
But there's more to Will than initially meets the eye. Able to flip through books at the rate of a page per second yet still retain everything he reads, Will possesses the intellectual equivalent of several college degrees, despite being a high-school dropout. His quick mind deconstructs even the most complex mathematics into laughably simply equations, making him the envy of every scholar he meets.
This includes Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard), an M.I.T. professor who is the first to recognize Will's extraordinary potential. After Will easily solves an equation that has baffled even Lambeau's most brilliant students, the professor comes to a staggering conclusion: M.I.T. harbors one of the sharpest mathematical minds the world has ever known... as its janitor.
Yes, a janitor, for that is the extent of Will's ambition. He walks around campus, emptying trashcans, mopping floors... and solving the math problems Lambeau leaves lying around, simply because he can. By the time Lambeau realises what's going on, Will is in jail, arrested once again for fighting. The judge, who knows Will's troubled past, does not wish to send him back to the streets, but Lambeau intercedes. If the judge is willing to release Will into his custody, Lambeau promises he will find counseling for the boy, plus keep him occupied with math-related work, which will hopefully keep him too busy to get into more trouble.
The math part is easy. Finding a counselor willing to spend more than ten minutes in the same room with Will, however, proves to be a major challenge. So clever is Will that he sees through every psychiatric trick anyone tries to pull on him. Desperate, Lambeau calls in his old college roomate and arch-rival, Sean McGuire (Robin Williams). From this point on, the story focuses on the complex relationship which develops between Sean and Will, with each man determined to wear the other down, and neither willing to give up on this goal.
Robin Williams has never been better. His performance as Sean is so intense that the word "brilliant" simply doesn't do it justice. Of particular note is the tear-jerking monologue (performed in a single unbroken take) that Sean recites to Will while the two are sitting in a local park, experiencing what Will calls "a Taster's Choice moment for guys." This speech ranks right up there with cinema's very finest. Mr. Williams deservedly brought home the 1997 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work here; even if the rest of the film had been horrible, this scene alone is powerful enough to justify his nomination.
Matt Damon is also very good. He plays Will as an insecure young man frightened by his potential; while not really malicious, Will is slow to trust others, and automatically pushes people away when they begin to get too close to him. We see this in his relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), a British student who falls in love with him. Their tumultuous romance forms one of the film's emotional cornerstones, as well as providing the setup for the story's bittersweet yet satisfying conclusion.
"Good Will Hunting" is an emotional tour de force, running the gauntlet from hilarity ("Do you like apples?") to heartache. The script, written by stars Damon and Affleck, is smart and rich, as are all the performances. Never boring or uninvolving, the film brings us deep into the world of a largely unsympathetic character and makes him a "real" person. Even as we recoil in horror at the way Will treats Skylar, we understand *why* he acts the way he does. His pain runs very deep; while that does not neccessarily excuse his behavior, it does explain it.
I read somewhere that Damon and Affleck's original idea for the script was closer to James Bond: they wanted to write an espionage/action film, with Will using his mental abilities to solve a mystery while "bad guys" try to kill him. Fortunately for us, screenplays have a way of evolving into their own thing. "Good Will Hunting" is sweet, funny, touching, memorable, and the furthest thing in the world from a ho-hum action movie. It was one of my favorite films of 1997.
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