PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
Almost three years to the day after the release of Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester hits theatres with a similar but equally effective story. The connection extends beyond just a comparable script, since both films were directed by Gus Van Sant. Even more remarkable is the source of the two scripts – the first was an out-of-left-field Oscar winner penned by two struggling actors (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), while the second comes via a Portland radio personality. And I won't even get started on the surprise cameo in Forrester's epilogue.
Replacing Damon's Will Hunting is 16-year-old Jamal Wallace (Robert Brown, in his acting debut), a promising basketball player and C-student at Bronx's Coolidge High School. Like Will, Jamal is whip-smart, but hides his talent because he doesn't want to stand out. He reads all the heavy-hitters that usually scare off kids his age and even writes religiously in a journal, which has recently grown into its fifth volume.
One night, Jamal is dared by his friends to break into the apartment of a ghost-like local legend known as The Window (a name garnered from wielding a pair of binoculars from his third-story window). Jamal gets in to the mystery man's home, but he's spooked and accidentally leaves his backpack (with journals) behind.
The next day, The Window (Sean Connery, Entrapment) unceremoniously drops Jamal's backpack to the street, where the surprised student discovers his journals have been covered in red pen corrections, culminating with one question on the last page – `Where are you taking me?' Curious, Jamal goes to The Window's apartment, where the two slowly develop a rapport revolving around writing.
What Jamal doesn't know is that hard-drinking man is really William Forrester, the reclusive author of `Avalon Landing,' a Pulitzer Prize-winning work heralded as The Great American Novel of the 20th Century. Forrester disappeared after achieving incredible fame through his first novel and has spent the last few decades holed up in his Bronx apartment avoiding everyone and everything (a la J.D. Salinger and his `The Catcher in the Rye').
When Jamal transfers to Manhattan prep school Mailor/Callow, he is greeted with open arms because of his basketball abilities. Nobody in the school thinks he could possibly be interested in an education and, as a result, Jamal grows a major chip on his shoulder because everybody assumes he's some dumb black kid. Meanwhile, Forrester is similarly pissed at the world for assuming they know what his novel was really about. The two stories are nicely paralleled, without being too obvious.
The antagonist in Forrester is a stuffy prick English professor (played by F. Murray Abraham) who doesn't believe Jamal is capable of the writing assignments he's been turning in. The film comes together over a writing contest at Mailor/Callow, which, although entirely predictable, had me a bit choked up.
Van Sant, who followed up his Oscar-nominated Hunting with an ill-advised, Razzie-winning, shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, does a fantastic job here with deejay Mike Rich's script. Forrester opens with a series of lovely shots of the Bronx and remains remarkably well-paced throughout. Even the basketball action is done nicely, and better than we've recently seen in Love and Basketball and He Got Game, which is pretty surprising, considering Van Sant is, essentially, an indie film director.
Actingwise, Connery can do no wrong, no matter how lowly the project (see Entrapment for further proof), but newcomer Brown steals the show as the jaded teen whose life is altered by a chance encounter. Anna Paquin (Almost Famous) does a good job in her supporting role as Jamal's classmate, and, thankfully, the film isn't slowed down by an unneeded relationship between the two. Technically, Forrester is a slick little package, wonderfully photographed by The Yards' Harris Savides and edited by Valdis Oskarsdóttir, the veteran of three Dogme films.
2:10 –PG-13 for brief strong language and some sexual references
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