Great Will Hunting

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2020)

Good Will Hunting is an excellent movie. The movie touches upon many aspects of human life. It shows fear, friendship, love, potential, pride, and sorrow along with many other aspects of human life. Good Will Hunting shows real human struggles, and real human triumphs. It has a great deal of genuine humanity for a film.
Good Will Hunting follows a young troubled genius named Will (Matt Damon)who lives in Boston. As the movie starts Will is working as a janitor at MIT. One of the Math professors at MIT writes an incredibly challenging problem on a chalkboard in a hallway and challenges students to solve it. Will solves it after hours and the Professor sees him but Will runs away. Will then hangs out with some friends and gets in a fight. He is going to be sent to jail when the Professor tracks him down, and gives him two conditions to be let out of jail: meet with him for math once a week, and meet with a therapist once a week. Will accepts and this sets the stage for the whole movie. His therapist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) and him continue to meet. Will is reluctant at first but he starts to trust Sean. Will also gets a girlfriend and starts to develop genuine feelings for her.
The movie has excellent characters and dialogue. When two characters talk on screen it feels like a real conversation. The way characters seem so comfortable with each other reminds me of the Oceans movies. The characters have realistic and consistent motives for their actions. The film also uses lots of humor, Will and his friends make fun of each other and the joking feels natural. Some scenes don't advance the plot but it doesn't feel like a waste because watching these characters just interact is captivating. There really aren't any major drawbacks of this movie for me. But it does use a lot of time to set the plot up. The story starts of fairly generic as well. When the movies plot gets going though and the climax is approaching I found myself genuinely glued to the screen. The movie's directing and soundtrack aren't groundbreaking, but they don't need to be for this film and they do their jobs well enough. The actors all do phenomenal jobs. This movie is some of the best acting I've seen from Matt Damon and Robin Williams.
The main strength of this movie is its humanity. It shows many challenges that real people face and it shows these challenges in a real way. The movie shows people dealing with the fear of the unknown and fear of commitment through the main character Will. Will also struggles letting people in and letting people know about his issues. The main struggles at the center of this movie are inherent struggles that come along with being human. Will may be incredibly genius but he's still easy to relate to. The way Will and his friends interact with each other is incredibly natural. Them arguing and joking in the car is incredibly fun to watch. But the best scene that showcases humanity in this movie when Will and Sean are sitting outside on a bench. Will starts cracking some jokes at Sean's expense but then Sean starts talking. Sean tells Will all the things he hasn't experienced yet in life, but the way Sean is doing it is outlining his own life. He's telling Will about the struggles that he's been through. The struggles that come with living a real life. Because the main lesson Sean wants will to learn is to not be afraid to live a real life and put himself out there. The acting in this scene by Robin Williams is immaculate. I've never seen anything done by him that tops this monologue. A Dead Poets Society rivals it.The writing in this scene is just beautiful.
Good Will Hunting is one of the few movies I've seen were the characters seem genuinely real and the movie is still captivating. It has that balance between cinematic moments and real human moments. I was sad when this movie ended because I didn't want to stop watching. I wanted to see more of these characters. The movie was centered around human struggles and human triumphs. This movie is a definite human triumph.