Bad Will Hunting By localroger in localroger's Diary Sat Oct 04, 2003 at 10:37:15 AM EST Tags: (all tags)
	I finally saw the movie Good Will Hunting this week, and all I can say is ... Let me rephrase that. Good Will Hunting isn't just a bad movie like the other movie we rented, Ghost Ship, which was a perfectly linear, predictable, and instantly forgettable horror flick. Good Will Hunting was bad in that way movies only attain when they are trying so hard to be Something SpecialTM that their pretensions carry them completely into Low Earth Orbit. Major spoilers inside, not that it matters much...

The biggest problem with Good Will Hunting is that it is a not very smart person's fantasy about what it would be like to be a really smart person. It's as if I set out to make a movie about baseball, knowing next to nothing about the game, and got half the rules wrong. Will's talent is justified in the script by mention of a brilliant Indian mathematician who educated himself from a single Western math book and extrapolated it so thoroughly that he came to the attention of a Cambridge scholar who sent for him. But one suspects Will is a bit different from this nineteenth century Indian dude. Did the Indian dude drink beer with his South Boston buddies every night? Did he have a hobby of getting into drunken brawls? Did he regard his maths as escapism from a life of menial work which, when pressed, he claimed to find more honorable and fulfilling than a life spent in a cubicle doing "long division?" People with Will Hunting's social background, abused children of blue-collar squalor, do not become people with Will Hunting's particular talent. There are too many distractions. The breadth of Will Hunting's talent is also extraordinary. He is not just good at maths; he displays a complete knowledge of Harvard's history curriculum, of psychology, and by implication just about everything else. Indeed, there is not one single instance in the entire film of Will Hunting making a purely intellectual error. It is a given that he is plugged into some kind of mysterious Source which does not allow him to be wrong about anything. Now I am widely regarded as being a pretty smart person, and I've spent my entire life listening to people tell me how smart I am. And it doesn't work that way. In fact it's pretty insulting to see it portrayed that way. (The scene where Will sneers "do you realize how easy this is for me?" in particular gave me a brief urge to smash the TV.) It's as if I made the aforementioned baseball movie, and the gimmick is that the main character always hits a home run. Like the basketball players in Pleasantville whose shots make the basket on four rebounds even if they throw the wrong way, Our Hero simply can't help knocking it out of the park. And when he pitches, same thing, he always strikes out the batter. Isn't the very idea already tickling your funny bone? Yuk Yuk Yuk. Those poor ordinary mortal baseball stars would just be so totally humiliated, and imagine the lengths the teams would go to to sign him! Especially if, get this, he would rather hang out at the Harvard library reading math books than play! Aren't you just ROFL thinking of how that would pan out? Especially if, being totally ignorant of baseball and baseball culture, I made up whatever baseball rules I happen to need to drive the plot? Of course that would be a terrible movie, for the same reason that Good Will Hunting is a terrible movie. Besides the insult to all the people who have worked hard to learn the craft of baseball, purely as a movie it would have no suspense. By contrast with such unbelievably supernatural talent the character's personal problems would seem pale and secondary, as do Will Hunting's. Good Will Hunting asks us to believe that a boy who can do nobel laureate level work without working up a sweat is so uninterested in doing such work that he'd rather knock down buildings and mop floors. It simply doesn't wash. If he found it that uninteresting he wouldn't have read the books and worked on the problems in the first place, photographic memory speed-reading or none. Outside of the smartness gimmick Good Will Hunting is basically the same story as Rocky, only less believable. It is a sign of how shallow the plot is that I forgot the girlfriend's name within five minutes of returning the DVD. Robin Williams is wasted in his role, which pivots around another scene that rings false, the catharsis triggered by Williams' repeating "It's not your fault..." as they stare at the folder containing his child abuse pics. (This scene was especially painful as it reminded me of Williams' role in Patch Adams, a movie in which Williams played the improbably smart person and which managed to do right all the things that Will Hunting does wrong.) The morass of conveniently interlocking personal problems put me in mind of another movie that went spectacularly wrong, Pay It Forward, to the extent that I briefly wondered if Will would be allowed to survive the movie. Alas, scriptwriters-actors Affleck and Damon seem to have been too in awe of their own character to kill him off. A shame, since I'd have volunteered for the part of the hit man. While the movie has its funny moments (most memorably "Why not work for the NSA?) it is too in awe of itself to work. The sad thing is it could have been done right. Make Will a middle class student with overprotective white-collar parents, and you could even keep the Right About Everything schtick without it seeming so unbelievably stupid. Then, the critical thing, once Will's talent is well established, the plot crisis must revolve around one thing: He has to be wrong about something. Not about those emotional things he's awkward with anyway, his central talent has to fail him, and he has to draw on those emotional things he's awkward with to save himself. That would have worked, it would have been interesting, and it would not have been insulting to those of us who tend to score in the top half of the bell curve on standardized tests. If someone like Will really existed, his true test of character would be learning that even he can be wrong no matter how smart he is -- just as Einstein, who is conspicuously mentioned in Good Will Hunting, more or less wasted the last forty years of his life on a quixotic attempt to unify physics without using the quantum theory he despised. Or, to return to the baseball story I'm smart enough not to make, I am smart enough to recognize the proper ending: Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville -- mighty Casey has struck out.

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Good Will Hunting Never Saw It 13% Sucked 9% Tried too hard 27% One Hanky 4% Three Hankies 13% Five Hankies 4% Best. Movie. Ever. 27% Votes: 22 Results | Other Polls

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