Director: Gus Van Sant
Writers: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck
Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Robin Williams, Stellan Skarsgård, Casey Affleck, Minnie Driver
Runtime: 126 mins.
1997
The final image of Good Will Hunting is a credit lingering over an endless highway: "In memory of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs." These defining voices of the Beat Generation died the year the film came out. The Beat Poets are stereotypically a young man's fixation, and this is a young man's movie. The Beats' writing is suffused with a palpable yearning, a lust for experience, a counterculture defiance, a tremendous and casual misogyny. Damon and Affleck continue in this tradition by smearing their hearts all over the page, messy in youthful ambition.
They tell the story of a young Bostonian janitor with a preternatural gift for mathematics, which gets discovered when he compulsively solves an unsolvable proof sitting unfinished on an MIT Math Department whiteboard. From there, Good Will (Matt Damon) is caught in a system that clashes with his every impulse as he is made ready to be an Important Math Man.
The movie is split into three parts that rarely overlap, a trick that lets the inexperienced screenwriters keep control of their story. The first plot situates Good Will amidst his Boston brethren. These kids are up to no good! This gets dramatized by a slo-mo neighborhood brawl that is so awkwardly staged and edited that it doubles back from serious to hilarious. Good Will's friends, the Affleck brothers and another guy, are the salt of the Earth. They spend most of their scenes crackin' wise, foolin' off, and usin' any number of unsavory words to describe sexual intercourse with women and the acquisition thereof.
The film's heart is with these scenes, but they ultimately fail. There is no plot movement, no character drama. The scenes are structured like sketch comedy: the boys hang out and say despicable things in gnarly accents. I'm not opposed to gnarly accents, nor characters saying despicable things, nor scenes built around their capacity to do so-- I love In Bruges, after all. But if a scene isn't going to move the needle on the story, it had better be funny. Confoundingly funny. These scenes are unfunny. Profoundly unfunny. I call to memory the sequence in which Casey Affleck reluctantly admits that he beat off into a baseball mitt moments earlier, which serves absolutely no purpose other than that someone thought it was cracking good comedy.
At least they're not like the hoity-toity academics recruiting Good Will for his brain. The tension between the working class and the academic elite is a driving force of the film; it's right there in the central image of Math Janitor. Too bad the math is meaningless. It's a screenwriting cop out, meant to signify "genius" without doing the work of investing in what genius means, or what mathematic genius specifically is like. The movie seems totally disinterested in its subject matter; every math scene is just Good Will scribbling something down and insisting repeatedly that it's right. Compare this to Queen's Gambit, which is foremost a character piece, but also explores the game and community of chess in a meaningful way. This leads to the dissonance of bizarrely antagonistic Professor Lambeau (a sleepy Stellan Skarsgård) claiming that he will make Good Will into an Important Math Man, then trying to ship him off to a number crunching job with the NSA.
The film carries an anonymous attitude towards the nature of genius that does not serve it well. Good Will is put on a pedestal, innately blessed, separate from his peers. He is beholden to cultivate his intellectual birthright. This film could have mounted a full critique of intelligence signifiers across class boundaries, and what skills are considered valuable by the bourgeoisie. Instead it is the story of a Special Little Boy who deserves better than his poor friends. Why, exactly? Because he's smahht.
Good Will triumphs over others not because of his moral insight, or unique orientation to the world, but because he's better at dick measuring contests. It feels satisfying when a bully gets his comeuppance, until you realize that Good Will just bullied harder. What's worse is that he uses this discursive mastery to claim a woman's affections. Her subjectivity is only there to prop up his masculinity. This is never clearer than when he brandishes her phone number to a group of men like it is a trophy, and we are supposed to see this conquest as another fist-pumping moment.
The second plot thread is Good Will's relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), the Manic-est Pixiest Dream Girl I have seen in a long time. I'm surprised she doesn't self-describe as a sapiosexual, the way she tolerates his ego and hangs on his every word. This plot is as stagnant as the first, pure wish fulfillment. Good Will is portrayed as entitled to Skylar's love, if only he wouldn't keep getting in his own way. This sparks a moment of actual conflict! Good Will lashes out at Skylar for attempting to get too close to him. Good Will verbally abuses her, shouting at full volume in her face to drown out what she is saying. Good Will physically abuses her, slamming his hand into the wall beside her head multiple times with force. Good Will emotionally abuses her, using a tactic called "trauma dumping" to force her sympathies by rattling off the horrible things that have happened to him in his life. That the film clearly expects us to walk away from the scene sympathizing with Good Will for all he's been through rather than Skylar, who just got abused, is even more indicative of the deep rot of misogyny in its bones than the tossed off sexist jokes about bitches and prostitutes.
If only there were someone to help him manage his feelings! We arrive at the third third of the movie, the most iconic and most successful of its plots, his relationship with therapist Sean (Robin Williams). Sean's entry point is prefigured by a comedic montage of Good Will ripping through unsuitable therapists, buttoned by a nasty bit of homophobia. Basically, Good Will destroys a therapist by calling him gay. This moment feels like an especially nasty bit of childishness on the part of the screenplay, both in its use of queerness as a punch line, and in its erection of a straw man therapist who crumbles under the slightest adversity.
The homophobia and transphobia in the film are meanspirited, though not so centralized as the misogyny, perhaps because the film doesn't offer up a gay character for the others to treat as a punching bag. I'm especially disgusted by the anecdote that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck included an explicit gay sex scene in the screenplay they were shopping around to test whether the producers were actually reading the script. Treating gay sex as an unimaginable and grotesque thing that nobody could possibly gloss over is telling. Lo and behold, it was Harvey Weinstein, a truly evil man, who 'passed their test.'
All that being said, the director of this film, Gus Van Sant, is a prominent auteur of the New Queer Cinema Movement. I have no idea what to make of that. I'm sure there are plenty of queer readings of this film to be found for those who wish to seek.
In any case, it's a relief when Williams finally hits the screen, an indicator that the 2hr 6min runtime sure could have used some trimming. I love Sean's look, all squashed and subdued. The movie comes to life around him. There's a gorgeous soft lit close up shot of Good Will looking at Sean's bookshelf that effectively evokes the experience of looking at a new mentor's décor for the first time. A window into a new world. It's one of only a handful of standout visual flourishes in the movie-- the candy cane MIT reunion outfits and a lovely insert of a boat gliding over water are the only other two that come to mind. Van Sant's direction here is anonymous, and pretty flat. He gets one thing exactly right, maybe the most important thing: anytime Sean is talking, he slaps a long, lingering close up shot on Robin Williams' face.
I'm inclined to attribute all the mileage this movie has gotten in the public consciousness to Williams' work. He is saddled with a cliche-ridden backstory, but plays it for all the pathos it's worth. The great accomplishment of this performance is Robin's insistence on foregrounding the immense sadness and heaviness of mentorship. This is a man who has helped countless others on their paths to catharsis before never seeing them again. He knows it is worth it, but he's also tired. For my money, it's the only good performance in the movie. Damon's emotional moments aren't grounded, and his portrayal of genius boils down to saying a lot of things really fast. He'd improve upon this strategy with his role as Jason Bourne.
"I can't talk first," Sean tells Professor Lambeau. He knows that he can only help Good Will if Good Will himself consents to be helped. This begins a long and winding process towards the culminating scene of Sean insisting to Good Will over and over again that it's not his fault, it's not his fault, it's not his fault. Good Will Hunting at its best is the story of a psychoanalytic relationship that penetrates a young man's masculine bravado enough to unpack the guilt of generational trauma.
The failure of Good Will Hunting is that he never operationalizes what he learns to apply it to the other plots. His work in therapy doesn't prompt him to change the cycles of violence that he and his friends enact-- Chuckie (Ben Affleck) just decides to tell him that he's special and he should go live his life. Nor does he ever take the step of unpacking his abusive misogyny. Instead we get that closing shot of the long winding road (courtesy of Ginsberg and Burroughs) as he drives off to claim his woman. Even Sean falls short of the spirit of this movie, when he violently chokes Good Will for making light of his dead wife. This is somehow portrayed as a positive step in their relationship. In this world, dominating someone is the way to get their respect.
Too glamorizing of Good Will's mastery to work as an emotional drama, too invested in psychological excavation to work as an irreverent comedy. Good Will gets uncritically rewarded for wielding the patriarchal phallus, the very thing that the analysis sessions are meant to be opposing. Casey Affleck himself would go on to make a much more insightful parable of masculinity with Manchester by the Sea, complete with Bostonian flavor. That film better understands the cage its main character occupies. Good Will Hunting tries so hard to be subtle and deep, but it cannot release the fantasy allure of the man who was born better.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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