Simplistic, Elitist Heartwarmer

Rating: Null/10 (23 June 2003)

*Spoilers*
Every time I see this movie I can't help focusing on the elitist premise. I still love it, but it's getting harder and harder to get carried away with it.
Ever notice how everyone in this movie is either a violent, profane slobs or cultured elites? The two characters who seem to belie this (Will and Robin Willams) are really just fallen elites: Williams, one who wandered far from the ivory tower and ended up teaching at Bunker Hill Community College; and Will, one savaged by the blue collar world he was born into.
Indeed the point of this movie is to bring Will and Robin Williams back into the fold, because how could anyone actually finding teaching at a community college rewarding? Or construction and demolition? My Word, that is for the lower classes.
Perhaps by dint of their natural talents, Will and Robin Williams don't belong in the worlds of community college and construction. Fine, I could buy that, if the Affleck and Damon hadn't felt the need to paint those worlds with such a broad and unflattering brush. To show the Bunker Hill Students as slack-jawed fools the first we enter William's classroom. To have William's character leave pack up and leave the hopeless, intellectual black hole that is their screenplay's Bunker Hill CC. To have not one character outside the elite-working class polarity, like a middle class college grad (not from an elite college)? Minnie Driver's character was an opportunity to aerate this suffocating polarity, but Matt and Ben saddled her with a trust fund and med school.
Would it have been a tradegy if Will--after being counseled and helped by Williams--went back to southie? Or went back to his construction job? Is his working class life so utterly irredemable? In Damon and Affleck's simplistic, MIT-Harvard-Ivy-League-or-nothing world, yes. Will's genius is nothing if it cannot be utilized by the establishment. I mean look at the alternative! And his reward is a big-breasted, big brained English babe and all these companies he interviews with at toward the end are willing to pay him.
It's not surprizing that Affleck and Damon came from middle to working class backgrounds to write this. Indeed, the most rabid snobs are usually those from humble backgrounds who achieved vast success. And nothing aggrandizes that success more than showing the ignorance, sloth, and violence from which it escaped.
Anyway, I wish I could still enjoy this movie the way I did six years ago.