Directed by:
Gus Van SantCinematography:
Jean-Yves EscoffierComposer:
Danny ElfmanCast:
Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Stellan Skarsgård, Minnie Driver, Casey Affleck, Cole Hauser, Alison Folland, Vik Sahay, Scott William Winters (more)VOD (2)
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Like his friends in down-town, working-class South Boston, Will Hunting (Matt Damon) spends his days between menial jobs, street brawling and stints at the local bar. Yet, he can summon obscure historical references from his photographic memory and solve mathematical problems that have stumped Nobel Prize winning professors. But the one thing Will Hunting can not do is talk his way out of a pending jail term and only one man is capable of rescuing Will from complete self destruction. (Roadshow Entertainment)
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Reviews (10)
I wish I'd seen it sooner. A nice human interest story about real issues, values and the right questions, what today's Oscar wannabes try so hard to emulate, but can't. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are great of course, but what the duo of Stellan Skarsgård and Robin Williams do is major league. Well deserved recognition, a great experience.
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I’m not at all shocked that Robin Williams got an Oscar for the psychiatrist role. Each word coming out of his mouth was pure wisdom and it was hard not to listen to him and enjoy his performance all at the same time. But Matt Damon and Ben Affleck also surprised me – and at a time when nobody expected it from them, too. They both had hair like boy band members and they were full of youth, and yet they managed to write such an amazing script full of truth. The scene where Will Hunting gets mad at oil companies at a job interview really did it for me.
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The two hunks did a good job writing it, although superficially, and where psychology was not enough, they provided proven phrases like "follow your heart". In the end, however, this drama about the search for the meaning of life also offers quite a moving resolution. What’s more, Van Sant directed it gently, with feeling and plenty of space for excellent actors... Even though Good Will Hunting bubbles like simple lemonade, it is able to amuse and has a decent impact.
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I enjoyed the film a lot more than the first time I saw it. Plus, I had some good laughs watching the scenes with Ben Affleck, whose face was clenched like a person's rectum. It was a good story, you could tell that the creators put effort into it, which means I wasn’t hit by a tsunami of pathos. 4*+
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Such clever boys. At an age when I was writing love ballads to my teenage sweethearts and gasping for breath with socialism, Damon and Affleck came up with a truly adult script that opens up a whole range of themes glossing over a somewhat extreme example of the actually inevitable step towards adulthood, however much that means freeing oneself from selfish freedoms at the expense of a certain uniformity and generally discernible motivations such as acknowledging one's place in society or making sacrifices on the altar of love. What they’ve bitten off, however, is quite a mouthful for the two burly guys, as there are actually four storylines in the film (Damon-Williams, Damon-Driver, Damon-Affleck, and Williams-Skarsgard), even if they’re all tied to a single denominator, but especially the one depicting the slacker resignation of the Boston suburbs (the bottom of which is so perfectly portrayed by Harmony Korine in a brief cameo – heh heh you gotta love this guy), it's all too obvious that the film needs it, especially at the beginning and the end. In between, it just has to keep it alive through more or less comic scenes. Where I would have given Oscar nods like crazy would have been in the case of Minnie Driver, that girl is unreal, she defies the usual femme fatale stereotypes, clearly her character has a life outside her scenes and her relationship with Damon gets the strongest sequences, among them the excellent bed dialogue, shot only in close-ups with subdued lights, where the camera work and editing make spatial orientation impossible, reminding you of those stormy weekends when it's raining outside and you don't even know what time it is.
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