Good Will Hunting disappoints. Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), three other, deeply personal works by Gus Van Sant, are wonderful in their comprehension of offbeat experience and the harsh underbelly of American life; and, though a departure from his trademark atmospheric lyricism, his To Die For (1995) is a delectably frosty social satire. There is also, however, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994). So? That numbingly dull film shows that, like any other mortal independent, Van Sant can be led (way) astray by a serious budget and an aura of “happening” publicity. But Good Will Hunting? This is nothing better than soap opera, a feel-good tearjerker with a dirty mouth.
The fault did not begin with Van Sant. The script is a pastiche of rhetorical scenes, sentimental clichés and selfconscious, “clever” dialogue. The authors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, are young actors out to create parts for themselves. (Projectively, their Hollywood peers voted them an Oscar.) Here they play longtime friends from lower-class South Boston, the kind of troubled, marginalized youth who should have no trouble engaging Van Sant’s compassion. Damon, the lead, plays Will Hunting, a foul-mouthed punk who gleefully beats up people and coldly turns away the girl he supposedly loves. How then good Will Hunting? In order to flatter and manipulate a self-pitying young target audience, the script overlooks Will’s (lack of) character and pronounces him, literally, a “good kid.”
Will is “good” on the theory that the (bad) way he is isn’t his fault; life hasn’t given him a chance to be anything else. An orphan since very early on, Will was physically abused by one of several foster fathers; thus, at twenty, where we find him, he is violent and vicious. He is pushing people away before they can abandon him—a “defensive” reaction, we are told. Undergoing psychotherapy as part of probation following an arrest for assault, he is, improbably, a speedreading, poetry-loving mathematical genius working as a janitor at M.I.T. (In an earlier incarnation of the script, apparently, he becomes a federal spy.) Before this cross between Ordinary People (1980) and Dead Poets Society (1989) ends, the boy is cathartically sobbing in his counselor’s arms, whereupon he is pronounced cured on the spot, causing even his legal obligations to evaporate. In truth, Will’s breakthrough would trigger only the beginning in earnest of his therapy; but the shorthand here is calculated to tug harder at our heartstrings. Will now sets out for the other coast, to join the girlfriend he treated like road dirt, while his counselor, inspired, also sets out in search of a new life. The script couldn’t be sillier.
Van Sant isn’t free from blame, either. Solemnly he presents material he should be mocking for the Oprahatic whitewash and psychobabble it is. Consider, also, this lapse in directorial judgment: following talk of it, the shot of a girl’s derrière. (Don’t blame the cutter; that shot must have come from somewhere.) Worse, despite references to South Boston and the hard luck Will represents, Van Sant does little to describe the boy’s environment regionally, socially or in terms of class. While there are short, thin stretches of melancholy poetry—what Van Sant is so good at—glimpsing Will’s tattered, broken milieu, these are too fleeting to ground the film in any sort of reality. Once again Van Sant is good at blending locals in with his actors; but nothing comes of it here. Why not interject documentary interviews, a tack he has taken before? (Of course, who knows what was taken out of his hands and his film; but that’s what comes from dealing with the commercial devil.) Sociology thus ends up lacking in a film whose one connection to reality the script posits in sociological terms.
Matt Damon can do little with the part of Bad Will Hunting. There is no investigation of character; all Damon does is play surly and, on a dime, turn on the waterworks—not acting, but mere attitude and emoting. In light of Van Sant’s record with Chiara Caselli, Matt Dillon, Ileana Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Kelly Lynch, Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, I doubt that the fault lies principally with the director. Affleck, though, is decent in a much smaller part.
Robin Williams plays Sean, the academic psychologist helping Will pro bono; ham-handed, he goes over the top while making a show of trying hard not to go over the top. It’s the kind of exhibition that too often wins Oscars—and, in this case, did. The script, little help, gives Sean a ridiculous rivalry with a former college roommate (Stellan Skarsgård, extraordinary in Kjell Grede’s Hip Hip Hurrah!, 1987, Hans Petter Moland’s Zero Kelvin, 1995, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, 1996, and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia, 1997, but, here, a twit) and a marital past—two years ago his wife of eighteen years died of cancer—that nothing in his manner or behavior in the least betrays. And, strategically withheld from us until the film goes emotional gangbusters, is the fact that Sean also was physically abused as a child.
Giving a good performance, however, is Minnie Driver as Skylar, Will’s (again improbably) rich English girlfriend. It isn’t Driver’s fault how hard it is to fathom what this girl sees in the charmless boy. At one point Will accuses Skylar of “slumming.” The accusation, the film suggests, is another sign of his “defensiveness.” Too bad; if the accusation bore merit, the relationship might convince.
Heaven knows, I wish Van Sant well. I am happy he has a hit. I hope Good Will Hunting proves to be his worst film ever—even, somehow, a necessary misstep in his growth as an artist.*
Van Sant has done passionate, evocative, probing work. I want more of it.
* Not to brag (of course not), but what I originally wrote turned out to be prophetic and Van Sant’s resurgence as artist lay ahead.
