Good Will Hunting . Newcity Chicago . 12-29-97

Good Will Hunting

DIRECTED BY: Gus Van Sant

REVIEWED: 12-29-97

Directed by Gus Van Sant. 127m. Charm is a funny thing, as mysterious as any of the components that a movie comprises. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two handsome, up-and-coming actors wrote "Good Will Hunting" for themselves to star in, and in the meantime, with Affleck in "Chasing Amy" and Damon in "The Rainmaker," they've become hot, hunky commodities. But that doesn't guarantee the kind of lucid appeal we see on screen. What happened? Through five years of Hollywood intrigues, their sometimes florid, yearning script finally wound up in the hands of van Sant, who works with uncustomary visual restraint. An intensely acted feel-good movie seems an unlikely quantity from the career chronicler of sweetly lawless outlaws, but here it is. Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT, an unlikely mathematics genius and autodidact philosopher who's more content to get into dust-ups with his childhood buddies and to drink his life away. Whenever someone gets too close, whether math professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard), or Harvard undergraduate Skyler (Minnie Driver) who falls in love with the pretty-mugged brawler (Driver is a big bonus in this boy's-story-- smart, darling and never subordinate to any other character). On one hand, "Good Will Hunting" could be taken as a modestly more ambitious version of studio high-concept: the therapeutic opening-up of a character's adolescent pain in "Ordinary People" meets the precocious genius of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" or "Amadeus." Yet the pop simplicity of the script--particularly once Lambeau brings Robin Williams' damaged therapist into the picture--is actually a joy. Etched with van Sant's trust of his actors and a remarkably textured use of Boston's Irish South End neighborhood, it all comes together to create a charming, affecting fairytale about finding the roles of parents and siblings satisfied in the larger world. 120m.

--Ray Pride

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Other Films by Gus Van Sant
Psycho
To Die For

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