the celebrated screenplay deserves all the hype

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2004)

It's great to see the film that propelled Matt Damon and Ben Affleck deep into the slime and bowels of Hollywood (and in Mr. Affleck's case, before banality and big budgets crept in). Here, the two are inadvertently amusing and prove that the celebrated screenplay deserves all the gloss despite occasional lurches into intellectual pretension.
Damon simply oozes with intelligence and you simply believe him, 'psychological issues' and all. American academia's nefarious exploitation of genius, corporate capitalist corruption, friendship, the hypocrisy of The Good Life, finding your own niche in the world- these are among the things grazed by and effortlessly woven into the dramatic flow of the story- which is ultimately "Good" Will Hunting's discovery of self and love. The terribly maudlin Robin Williams injects warmth and scruples, and the Elliott Smith music resonates with redemption.