Cinema
Good Will Hunting (15, selected cinemas)
Peculiar genius
Mark Steyn There's a North American radio com- mercial for some sort of amazing DIY 'lit- eracy' course which begins: 'How would you like to read an entire novel in your lunch hour?' Personally, I can't think of anything worse — unless, of course, I was The Spectator's chief fiction reviewer and wanted to dispatch a couple of butt-num- bers before bunking off early. Nevertheless, in Good Will Hunting, the eponymous Will, a genius, demonstrates said genius by memorising a book simply by turning the pages and regurgitating a lot of informa- tion at extremely fast speed. This is, need- less to say, Hollywood's idea of genius: there isn't a producer in town who wouldn't love a kid in the outer office who could read an entire novel over lunch and then pitch it in eight seconds. No more 'I just read half of it all the way through,' as Louis B. Mayer once told a writer.
The writers of Good Will Hunting are, in fact, actors — Matt Damon, who appears in The Rainmaker, and Ben Affleck, who turned in a very dreary performance in the recent boy-meets-lesbian romance Chasing Amy. That said, they have their own pecu- liar genius: the script started out as an action thriller about a race against time to avert mass destruction; then, at Rob Rein- er's suggestion, the boys converted it into an all-talk-and-no-action touchy-feely cock- le-warmer about male bonding. The rewrite trembles on the brink of a dysfunction-of- the-week television movie but never quite nose-dives in, thanks mainly to Gus Van Sant's direction and two blow-job jokes.
Will, played by Matt, is now a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, loitering with his mop and pail by the blackboard and anonymously solving the most complicated mathematical theorems, like: (Y-L) x 7217*/7 (@§g) [$$$$] (I quote from memory).
Actually, that one isn't too difficult, as it represents the precise formula for a Holly- wood flop, where zzz =Kevin Costner, 1,.= Demi Moore's breast implants and §= the differential between a film directed by Quentin Tarantino and a film with a cameo by Quentin Tarantino. Good Will Hunting avoids most of those pitfalls, but not quite all. Its trump card is Damon, who struts through the film with the cockiness of a good-looking serial killer. He's not very plausible as a genius, but then he's not very plausible as a janitor either, so it all evens out. What he has is a breezy intensity and the same kind of bantam rooster quality as the young Cagney, albeit gussied up and airbrushed, as is the Nineties' wont.
As for Will himself, he's merely the latest variation on Forrest Gump — this time an asshole savant: for all his facility with physics and history, he'd rather drink beer, beat guys to a bloody pulp and say 'fuck' a lot. The film is unusually strong in these scenes. It doesn't sentimentalise the lads as poets in the raw, held back only by the iniq- uities of class: Chuckie (Affleck) and Will's other pals from Southie — South Boston — are shown as amiable yobs, perfectly content within their shrunken horizons. The loathing that the college maintenance staff feel for the professors is also well done, and there's a sharp scene where Will and a Harvard boy spar over Minnie Driv- er. 'You just paid $150,000 for an educa- tion you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the library."True, but at the end of it I'll have a degree and you'll be serving my kids fries in the drive-thru on the way to our ski vacation.'
The forces of higher education are repre- sented by Stellen Skarsgard as an MIT pro- fessor looking for his ticket to the top. Skarsgard turns in his second fine perfor- mance in a fortnight (after last week's Amistad), and it would have been interest- ing to see the film explore his relationship with Will — both men, in opposite ways, frustrated by the size of their brains. Instead, Skarsgard is there essentially to introduce Will to a shrink pal of his. The shrink is played by Robin Williams. Even worse, it's Robin Williams in that beard he keeps in the drawer and only brings out for serious roles.
The beard is working overtime here: Williams's therapist is a Vietnam vet, child- abuse survivor, recent widower and com- munity college loser, due to the fact that his career stalled while his late wife spent 18 of their 20 years together on her death bed. In the forthcoming Woody Allen film Deconstructing Harry, Williams has a small role as an actor who goes out of focus: whenever the camera tries to film him, he's all fuzzy and blurred. On the evidence of Good Will Hunting, this is becoming a recurring problem: his eyes are permanent- ly fuzzy and blurry, as if he's on the brink of tears. It's the most pathetically shame- less exercise in self-pity. Apparently, Williams's participation was Miramax's condition for making the film. That's a pity, because his performance is at odds with everyone else's and the weak link in a strong cast.
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