This review by Rob Nijman.
Bostonian. Probably the best accent American English has to offer – barring perhaps the slick New York swagger found in Mean Streets’ Johnny Boy, or in any movie where Edward Burns gets to play himself. Beantown movies should be watched for the accent alone.
The adaptations of Dennis Lehane novels are some of last decade’s best, but my favourite movie set in the Capital of New England predates his Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island, and although I have high hopes for The Given Day – once rumoured to be directed by Sam Raimi – I don’t think Good Will Hunting is in jeopardy of losing that top spot any time soon. Not even Scorsese’s The Depah’ted claimed it, which has to count for something..
Good Will Hunting is about genius. Either falling just short of it, or having plenty of it and maybe throwing it all away. But I don’t need to tell you that. The nearly fifteen year old movie – has it really been that long since we saw Ben & Matt jump up and down that Oscar podium..? – needs little introduction. It has the more-quotable-than-you’d-remember script that skyrocketed Damon and Affleck, and put Robin Williams on par with the Oscar-winning likes of Alan Arkin, Chris Cooper and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
After Will, the textbook example of not knowing what it is you’re looking for by pretending you do, is arrested for fighting and assaulting an officer, he has to see a therapist and work with a respected mathematician at MIT (Skarsgard in good form) to sidestep some jail time. The heart of the movie’s plot, besides relationships in general, is essentially his relationship with the both of them.
“You can be a janitor anywhere, why did you choose the most
prestigious technical college in the whole fucking world?“
The therapist of course is Robin Williams, in what is probably his finest effort. And I’m not saying that because they gave him the gold. After all, he had already proven his acting prowess is in drama, not comedy. Case in point: Awakenings (and maybe Good Morning Vietnam, where the best parts were not the on air dick jokes so much as the, you know, less than humourous parts of Vietnam).
“Tomorrow we’ll talk about Freud, and why he did enough cocaine to kill a small horse.” An offhand remark that hints at a Williams who can improv his way through half a movie, but who is leashed and held back, to fit the quiet, introvert and effortlessly interesting character that is his Sean. And I do mean leashed; look him up on IMDb, he can’t even be serious on his avatar.
The obvious Oscar clip would be Williams’ tour de force on a park bench, cleverly filmed by Gus van Sant, who keeps his camera on Williams all through his monologue, right up to the point we shift to watch Damon quietly taking it all in. When Van Sant does pan over to Damon, we see what we already know: Williams’ doc is spot on, and ol’ Will Hunting has no clever comeback whatsoever. Not this time.
Meanwhile Will is seeing Skylar (Minnie Driver), the kind of girl we could all wish to date – in line with what I’ll say later on about the script. He’s unable to really be intimate with her though, as something holds him back. As an additional relationship, this is what thickens the plot.
Another kinship of course is between Will and his boys, most notably Chuckie (Affleck), who would “lie down in traffic for him.” But also Morgan (Affleck Jr.) and Billy (Cole Hauser) and their mutual banter. “You get canned more than tuna, bitch.”
The choices Will doesn’t make are made easier, because with these guys he can just sit in a bar and pretend he’ll still have the same kind of jobs they’ll have in ten, twenty, thirty years to come. Until people start telling him what’s what. Until Chuckie levels with Will, saying he’s got a gift and shouldn’t squander it. Until Sean makes it okay for him to let people into his life again – which works for the widowed therapist himself as well. Until he’s ready to step outside his protective circle and make the decisions he ought to make.
“That’s a super philosophy, Sean. That way you can actually go through
the rest of your life without ever really knowing anybody.”
If Tom Hanks is today’s Jimmy Stewart, Matt Damon probably is this generation’s Jack Lemmon. He may not be as funny, be he is as likeable – on and off screen. Of course, he gets the girl, befriends the therapist, and ‘does the right thing’. No real surprises at that particular destination. The movie, as is often the case, is about the road he takes to get there though, and the character that is built upon it.
“Do you like apples?”
In the end, what happened is two childhood friends got together and wrote down a story out of dialogue you could fantasize having. ‘What if i was wicked smah’t?’ Much of the script’s dialogue, especially Will’s part, is only that clever because it was written down first. The discussion in the bar, the monologue about not wanting to work for the NSA, the pick-up verse, it’s never that easy to spout lines like that. Not in real life. Except when you carefully script them first. Then they work – it’s a writers dream, how well (Good) Will Hunting makes them work. On and off screen.
“See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in fifty years you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life.
One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fucking education you coulda got for a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library.”
