Not By Brains Alone

Rating: 5/10 (18 November 2004)

Will Hunting is a young working-class man from South Boston who works as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His favourite pastimes are hanging out with a gang of his friends, getting drunk, getting into fights and breaking the law. He also happens to be a mathematician of genius, whose talents are revealed when he is seen writing out the answer to a problem which has baffled the world's greatest mathematical minds and which Professor Lambeau, a lecturer at the Institute, has written on a blackboard. The Professor becomes Will's mentor, trying to nurture his mathematical talents, and when Will again gets into trouble with the law on assault charges, Lambeau arranges a deal whereby he will qualify for parole provided he agrees to psychiatric treatment. The first two psychiatrists Will is sent to find him too much to handle, but eventually Lambeau refers him to an old friend, Sean Maguire.
Maguire is an unhappy man, grieving over the death of his wife. At first he and Will find it difficult to get on with each other, but later discover a rapport. The rest of the film can be seen as the story of the psychological journeys of Will and Sean. (The film's title is presumably a laboured pun on the main character's name and on the meaning 'hunting for goodwill'). Will must decide whether to develop his talents or to remain with his friends in the blue-collar milieu with which he is most familiar; he also needs to overcome his childish, self-destructive impulses and develop a more mature, responsible attitude towards others, particularly his girlfriend Skylar. Sean needs to come to terms with his devastating loss.
Robin Williams's touching performance as Sean is nonetheless a very good one, and quite the best thing about this film, although I am not sure that it was really deserving of an Oscar (I preferred Anthony Hopkins in 'Amistad'). On the other hand, I thought that Williams deserved Oscars for 'Good Morning Vietnam' and 'Dead Poets Society' and was passed over on each occasion, so justice has finally been done. I was less impressed, however, by the other leading actors. Stellan Skarsgard was not convincing as Lambeau and Minnie Driver as Skylar even less so.
More crucially to the success of the film, Matt Damon never succeeded in bringing Will to life or in bridging the gap between the two sides of his character, brilliant intellectual on the one hand and street thug on the other. To be fair to Damon the actor (as opposed to Damon the scriptwriter), the fault lies less in the way the character is played than in the way the character is written. Will is not just a brilliant mathematician but a brilliant polymath with an encyclopedic knowledge of subjects such as history and law. (He uses the former in a devastating put-down of an arrogant Harvard student in a bar, and the latter in an attempt to defend himself in Court). To judge from his conversations with Sean, he also seems to fancy himself as a psychoanalyst. It is possible that a person with only basic formal education could have acquired such knowledge of diverse subjects, but only through a rigorous programme of study, and Will's life outside of his work seems to revolve around bar-rooms rather than libraries and boozing and brawling rather than auto didactic learning.
Besides the central character's lack of credibility, the film's other main weakness is its funereal pace- too much talk and too little in the way of action. The central message- that man cannot live by the intellect alone, but also needs emotional sustenance and a system of moral values- is a worthy one, but I would have liked to have seen it conveyed in a more believable and less long-winded manner. 5/10 (a mark that would have been lower but for Williams).