Manipulative and Heartwarming

Rating: 6/10 (31 May 2003)

SPOILERS.
I can see why this project was greenlighted. It's got everything a Hallmark feature should have -- plus profanity. A love story between a brilliant lower-class boy and a young girl at Harvard. (In the original "Love Story" it was more or less the other way around.) A tortured boy barely out of his teens who is a miscreant and unable to expose himself to others and who is not "in touch with his feelings." (I've always wondered how you get in touch with your feelings.) Well, it's worked dozens of times before -- "Blood Brothers," "David and Lisa," inter alia.
In this instance he's wary of others because he was abused as a child; cf., any of two or three dozen Lifetime Movies for Women. A very human but somewhat remote academic mentor, and a warm, humanistic, unpretentious bearded shrink, as in "Ordinary People." A score that tells us when we're supposed to laugh and when we're supposed to tear up. Good, evocative location shooting in Boston. Is Will Hunting going to be able to overcome his fear of commitment, leave Beantown, and find himself emotionally and intellectually? (How do you find yourself?)
We viewers want him so badly to choose the right path, which we can discern amidst the murky and myriad possibilities even if he can't, that we feel like we're watching someone trying to shove a boulder and we find ourselves sitting in our seats and humping along with him. Does he make the right choice? Does a bear hibernate in the winter?
Well, I'm sorry. I kind of enjoyed the first half hour or so, when Will Hunting's genius is being finally and painfully uncovered. It was kind of confusing though, in a technical sense. Mathematics is one of those creative talents that appears at an early age, rather like genius in music. It tends to peter out in early adulthood. (If you haven't made it as a professional mathematician by the time you're twenty-five you're considered over the hill in academia.) In other words, mathematical genius has a life course of its own, almost, but not quite, independent of what is generally recognized as "intelligence." But Matt Damon, as Will Hunting, not only has this isolated talent, but something that resembles a photographic memory as well. He's remembered practically everything he's ever read, which is practically everything ever written, from law to organic chem, although we never see him reading a book. If a kid in my working-class neighborhood ever was caught reading Nietzsche, he'd be twitted to death.
Well, eidetic imagery (or photographic memory) really does exist. You can hold up an ordinary comb in front of a kid who "has" it, for a few seconds, then put the comb out of sight and the kid will be able to tell you the number of teeth in the comb, because the image in his mind is so clear that he can count them. But, like musical or mathematical genius, it shows up early, in young kids, then tends to fade. And again, it's independent of ordinary intelligence. For one individual, especially at the age of twenty-one, to have both singular geniuses at the same time, is so unlikely as to constitute an irritation for someone watching the flick. I mean, it's like drawing two straight flushes, one after the other.
And then too, it makes me squirm when I watch a scene in which a shrink brings up the abuse his client suffered in childhood and then tells him over and over (and over), "It's not your fault," until the client breaks into a cascade of fulsome sobs and the two of them hug one another like Esalen grads. Who ever claimed it was the client's fault in the first place? Why in God's name should the client blame himself for the brutality instead of the foster fathers who are the guilty parties here? (Hint: the script calls for it.)
And there are shouted arguments between the academic mentor -- played in a most engaging way by Skarsgard -- and the humanistic shrink -- done devilishly by Robin Williams -- that seem to take place only because they add texture to the picture. Neither the mathematician or the shrink show the slightest evidence of being the shouting type. There's also a shouted argument between Will and his girl friend that isn't called for either, although a simple disagreement would have been plausible.
I guess what I'm saying is that this is a commercial product. It could have come out of a course in screen writing taken through Phoenix University. Introduce interesting characters with idiosyncratic traits, pull the audience in, then tug at the plot and the heartstrings. Have a scene in which an emotionally distant person finally breaks down and cries. In the last half of the movie, when the interest may be dying down, pump it up with fights between people we like.
This isn't meant as cynicism or a blanket condemnation of the talent involved in the production. Matt Damon is particularly good as a bragging roughnecked Southie. Contrast this performance with what he does in "The Talented Mister Ripley." When he and Williams have a quiet confrontation on a park bench, Damon gives the scene entirely to the shrink. Robin Williams does a fine imitation of Oliver Sacks. (Why does he choose so many other poor vehicles?)
Van Sandt handles the direction competently, but see "Drugstore Cowboys" for a more personal Weltanschauung, in some ways just the opposite of the one presented here. It isn't nearly as heartwarming as "Good Will Hunting," thank Bog.