Good Will Hunting is a
1997 drama film
directed by
Gus Van Sant and written
(with help from Van Sant) by
Matt Damon
and
Ben Affleck, who both star in the
film.
The movie
tells the story of Will Hunting, a prodigy hoodlum from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT
.
Good Will Hunting was a financial success, earned several
awards, and launched Damon and Affleck into prominence.
Plot
Though
Will Hunting (Matt Damon) has a genius-level intellect, eidetic memory and a profound gift for
mathematics, he works as a janitor at
MIT and lives
alone in a sparsely-furnished house in a rundown South Boston
neighborhood. An abused
foster
child, he
subconsciously blames
himself for his unhappy upbringing and turns this
self-loathing into a form of self-sabotage in
both his professional and emotional lives.
In the first week of class, Will solves a difficult graduate-level
problem taken from
algebraic
graph theory that Professor Gerald Lambeau (
Stellan Skarsgård), a
Fields Medalist and
combinatorialist, leaves on a chalkboard as a
challenge posed to his students, hoping someone might find the
solution by the end of the semester. When it is solved quickly and
anonymously, Lambeau posts a much more difficult problem-one that
took him and his colleagues two years to prove. When Lambeau
chances upon a janitor writing on the board, Lambeau chases him
away. However, when Lambeau returns to the board, he is astounded
to find the correct answer there. He then sets out to track Will
down.
Meanwhile, Will gets revenge on a bully named Carmine Scarpaglia,
who, according to Will, used to beat him up years ago in
kindergarten, and he now faces imprisonment after attacking a
police officer who was responding to the attack. Realizing Will has
enormous potential, Lambeau goes to Will's trial and intervenes on
his behalf, offering him a choice: either go to jail, or be
released under Lambeau's personal supervision to study mathematics
and see a
therapist. Will chooses the
latter, even though he does not believe he needs therapy.
Will treats the first five psychologists Lambeau has him see with
utter contempt. In desperation, Lambeau finally calls on Sean
Maguire (
Robin Williams), an
estranged old friend and MIT classmate who happens to have grown up
in the same neighborhood as Will. Sean differs from his
predecessors in that he pushes back at Will and is eventually able
to get past Will's hostile, sarcastic
defense mechanisms. Will is particularly
struck when Sean tells him how he gave up his ticket to see the
Red Sox in
Game 6 of the
1975 World Series (thus missing
Carlton Fisk's
famous home run) in order to
meet and spend time with a stranger in a bar, who would later
become his wife.
This encourages Will to try to establish a
relationship with Skylar (Minnie
Driver), a young English woman he had earlier met at a bar near
Harvard
University
.
This
doctor-patient
relationship, however, is far from one-sided. Will challenges
Sean to take a hard, objective look at his own life. Sean has been
unable to deal with his beloved wife's premature death from
cancer two years before.
Meanwhile, Lambeau pushes Will so hard that Will eventually refuses
to go to the job interviews that Lambeau arranges for him. Will
accidentally walks in while Lambeau and Sean are furiously
squabbling about the direction of his future.
Skylar
asks Will to move to California
with her, where she will begin medical school at
Stanford. Will
panics at the thought. When Skylar expresses sympathy about his
past, it triggers a tantrum and Will storms out of the dorm. He
shrugs off the work he has been doing for Lambeau as "a joke."
Lambeau begs Will not to throw it all away, but Will walks
out.
Sean points out that Will is so adept at anticipating future
failure in his interpersonal relationships, that he either allows
them to fizzle out or deliberately bails, so he can avoid the risk
of emotional pain. When Will refuses to give an honest reply to
Sean's query about what he wants to do with his life, Sean shows
him the door. Will tells his best friend Chuckie (
Ben Affleck) that he wants to be a laborer for
the rest of his life. Chuckie becomes brutally honest with Will: he
feels it's an insult for Will to waste his potential, and that his
greatest wish is to knock on Will's door one morning and find he
isn't there.
Will goes to another therapy session, where he and Sean share that
they were both victims of
child abuse.
Sean then gets Will to truthfully reply to him stating, "It's not
your fault" over and over. At first Will responds to the comment
saying "Yeah I Know" but after repeating, Will begins to cry and
Sean comforts him. Finally, after much self-reflection, Will
decides to cease being a victim of his own inner demons and to take
charge of his life.
When his buddies present him with a rebuilt
Chevrolet Nova for his 21st birthday, he
decides to go after Skylar, setting aside his lucrative corporate
and government job offers. Concurrent to the scene in which Will
leaves, Chuckie knocks on Will's door, and gets no reply. Will
leaves a brief note for Sean, using one of Sean's own quips, "If
the professor calls about that job, just tell him, sorry, I have to
go see about a girl."
Cast
Production
Affleck and Damon originally wrote the
screenplay as a thriller: Young man
in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a
superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a
G-Man.
Castle Rock Entertainment
president
Rob Reiner later urged them to
drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship
between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At
Reiner's request, noted screenwriter
William Goldman read the script and further
suggested that the film's climax ought to be Will's decision to
follow his girlfriend Skylar (Driver) to California. Goldman has
denied widely spread rumors that he wrote
Good Will
Hunting or acted as a
script
doctor.
Castle Rock bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000,
meaning that Affleck and Damon would stand to earn an additional
$100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing
credit. However, studios balked at the idea of Affleck and Damon in
the lead roles. At the time Damon and Affleck were meeting at
Castle Rock, director
Kevin
Smith was working with Affleck on
Mallrats and with both Affleck and Damon on
Chasing Amy. Seeing that
Affleck and Damon were having trouble with Castle Rock, Smith and
his producer partner
Scott Mosier
brought the script to
Miramax, which
eventually caused the two to receive co-executive producer credits
for
Hunting. The script was put into
turnaround, and Miramax bought the rights
from Castle Rock.
After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax gave the green
light to put the film into production. Several well-known
filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including
Mel Gibson,
Michael Mann and
Steven Soderbergh. Originally Affleck
asked
Kevin Smith if he was
interested in directing, Smith declined, saying they needed a "good
director," stating he only directs things he writes and he is not
much of a visual director. Affleck and Damon later chose
Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work in
previous films like
Drugstore
Cowboy (
1989) had left a
favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was
persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.
Good
Will Hunting was filmed on location in the Greater Boston
area and
Toronto
over five months in 1996. Although the story is
set in Boston, much of the film was shot at locations in Toronto,
with the University of
Toronto
standing in for MIT and Harvard
, and the
classroom scenes being filmed at McLennan Physical
Laboratories(of the University of Toronto) and Central
Technical School
. The interior bar scenes set in South Boston
("
Southie") were shot on
location at "Woody's L St. Tavern".
The cast engaged in considerable improvisation in rehearsals; Robin
Williams, Ben Affleck and Minnie Driver each made significant
contributions to their characters. Robin Williams' last line in the
film, as well as the therapy scene in which he talks about his
character's wife's little idiosyncrasies, were both ad-libbed. The
therapy scene took everyone by surprise. According to Damon's
commentary in the DVD version of the movie, this caused "Johnny"
(the cameraman) to laugh so hard that the camera's POV can actually
be seen moving up and down slightly as it shows Damon breaking
character by also laughing so hard.
Director Gus Van Sant says in the DVD commentary that, had he known
just how successful the movie was going to be, he would have left
at least a couple of edited scenes intact that were cut purely for
considerations of length. One of these involves Skylar's visit to
Chuckie in hopes of shedding light on some of Will's eccentricities
that Will himself is unwilling to discuss.
- Filming locations
The film is dedicated to the memory of poet
Allen Ginsberg and writer
William S. Burroughs, both of whom died in
1997.
Reception
Good Will Hunting received many positive reviews from
film critics: It has a 97% "Fresh"
rating according to film review compilation website
Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for many
awards (see below).
According to the
box office reports,
Good Will Hunting grossed $225 million internationally
(twenty-two times the film's budget). Although the film's limited
release at the end of 1997 (traditional for likely
Oscar candidates) merely hinted at its future
success, the film caught on, thanks to good reviews and a strong
reception by the American public. The film received international
praise, in part due to the acting of
Matt
Damon,
Robin Williams and
Minnie Driver, all of whom were
nominated for
Academy Awards for the
film, with Williams winning. Damon and Affleck won an Oscar for
Best Original Screenplay.
- Box office
Released in US: December 5, 1997 (limited),
January 9, 1998 (wide)
Opening Weekend: $272,912 (limited), $10,261,471
(wide)
Studio: Miramax
Total US Gross: $138,433,435
Production Budget: $10,000,000
Rentals: $53,988,000
Worldwide Gross: $225,900,000
Soundtrack
- Track listing
- Elliott Smith - "Between the Bars"
(Orchestral)
- Jeb Loy Nichols - "As the Rain"
- Elliott Smith - "Angeles"
- Elliott Smith - "No Name #3"
- The Waterboys - "Fisherman's Blues"
- Luscious Jackson - "Why Do I
Lie?"
- Danny Elfman & Steve Bartek -
"Will Hunting" (Main Titles)
- Elliott Smith - "Between the Bars"
- Elliott Smith - "Say Yes"
- Gerry Rafferty - "Baker Street"
- Andru Donalds - "Somebody's
Baby"
- The Dandy Warhols - "Boys
Better"
- Al Green - "How Can You Mend a Broken
Heart?"
- Elliott Smith - "Miss
Misery"
- Danny Elfman & Steve Bartek - "Weepy Donuts"
"Miss Misery" was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best
Original Song, but lost to "
My
Heart Will Go On" from
Titanic.
While
Danny Elfman's score was
nominated for an
Oscar, only two cues
appear on the film's soundtrack release. Elfman's "Weepy Donuts"
was used on NBC's
The Today
Show on
September 11 2006, while
Matt Lauer spoke
during the opening credits.
Starland Vocal Band's "
Afternoon Delight" is also featured
in the closing credits after "Miss Misery," but does not appear on
the soundtrack.
Awards
70th Academy Awards
55th Golden Globe Awards
Other Major Awards/Nominations
See also
References
- see Goldman's memoir Which Lie Did I Tell?
- Smith's comments on the Mallrats DVD audio commentary
- Good Will Hunting Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten
Tomatoes
External links
, heading west towards the New York
border. When the car passes under a bridge,
the sign on the bridge reads Prospect St Stockbridge.
- Gus Van Sant
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