Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Suddenly, the advertising changed. When Gus Van Sant's new film Good Will Hunting opened several weeks ago in selected theaters in major cities, the ad campaign was set and clear. Prominently featured beneath the title was a photo of stars Matt Damon and Robin Williams. Damon, cute and fresh-faced on the left, is gazing out of the frame toward the right. Williams, seated on the left, is looking at Damon, avuncular and tender. The scene reads "boy movie."

In mid-January, when the film broke wide to suburban mall theaters, the ads changed radically. Now, Damon is looking straight out to the reader, and he's holding in his arms Minnie Driver, his love-interest in the film. To the left is Williams looking avuncular and tender at the two of them. New message: "date movie."

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The first ad was tasteful and conveyed the tone and measure of the film. Good Will Hunting is about a working-class young man-- Will Hunting (Matt Damon)-- from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT. But the hook of the film is that, although he appears to be just a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he is actually a math genius with a photographic memory.

Long story short: Professor seeks out Will to exploit his genius, Will gets into fight and hits a cop, Professor bails him out, terms of probation require that Will see a therapist and presumably teach Professor how to make numbers add up better. Sean, the therapist, is played by Robin Williams and is an old friend/rival of the Professor and-- not uncoincidently, an old Southie boy himself who had made good, gone to Harvard, but never realized his full potential. Will and Sean learn to trust one another, Sean learns to get over feeling bad about lost opportunity, Professor realizes that there is more to life than theorems, and Will gets to date a Harvard girl who loves him for his mind (though God knows, his body isn't bad either).

Here we have it, all the great themes of American literature: male-bonding, success versus failure, working-class know-how versus intellectual effeteism, cute boys, math, and a co-ed. This is Moby Dick meets Campus Hi-Jinx or The Deerslayer meets Love Story.

As a movie, Good Will Hunting is close to appalling. Unoriginal, sentimental, sloppily written, it is a come-down from director Gus Van Sant's best earlier work-- Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho. And it is also fundamentally dishonest. Written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-- both of whom appear, the latter in a minor role as Will's best friend-- it is a middle-class white-boy fantasy about how cool and manly working-class guys are. Next to the effete Ivy Leaguers, they are the real men, the ones who work for a living in construction, who say fuck a lot, and who know how to pick up girls.

The problem is that Damon and Affleck's concepts of South Boston and the working class are sentimentalized nonsense. Not surprising: both of them come from middle-class professional Cambridge families and dropped out of Harvard to become actors. Of course, the glitch in this is that the best sort of working-class man is the one who is actually an undiscovered genius and who only needs to go to therapy-- talk about a middle-class solution!-- to realize his full potential. Will, you see, is not only working-class, but an orphan who has been shuttled from foster home to foster home and horribly abused. This gives Robin Williams a chance to do the most awful wise-cracking therapist shtick to "heal" Will. "It's not your fault," he says as he hugs Will. And guess what? It works. Will gets better, gets a grip, gets out of Southie, and gets the girl. He also gets the kind "father" he never had, and like all fathers, Sean gets to live out his wasted life through his genius son.

Co-ed subplot notwithstanding, the feeling of Good Will Hunting is homosexual. Will loves his buddies, his buddies love Will. Will becomes great buddies with the therapist, and because he is also working-class and real cool he is great buddies with Will.

Co-ed Minnie Driver is odd girl out. This is not only a boy movie, it is a boy movie that has little interest in girls. Van Sant, Damon, and Affleck perhaps realized this, because they have peppered the film with overt and covert homophobic references. All of the Harvard and MIT men are affected effetes or castrated eunuchs who cannot love life or women. When Will (who is only doing this to stay out of jail) sees the first therapist, he one-ups him by calling him a homosexual. After Will and Sean have a breakthrough during one of their long hugging sessions, Will asks if this is unprofessional and Sean replies, "Only if you grab my ass."

Good Will Hunting is so obsessed with its false notion of what it means to be a "real man"-- they hang out with other "real men" and drink and say fuck and make fun of intellectuals-- that it begins to realize that it looks a little queer. And what better way to avoid looking queer then to be calling everyone else homosexuals?

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com