Good Will Hunting arrived in December 1997 as a Miramax release with a $10–16 million budget and two unknown screenwriters in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It left with $225.9 million worldwide and two Academy Awards. The film is directed by Gus Van Sant and runs 127 minutes. It is a drama about a janitor who can do mathematics no one else at MIT can do, and who cannot do much of anything else.
Trailer, via Miramax.
Will Hunting Solves the Blackboard Problem
The setup is clean. Will Hunting is a 20-year-old from South Boston, self-taught, working as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spends his free time drinking with Chuckie, Billy and Morgan. Professor Gerald Lambeau, a Fields Medal winner, posts a complex problem on a blackboard as a challenge for his graduate students. Will solves it anonymously.
Lambeau posts a harder one. He catches Will writing the solution and mistakes him for a vandal, chases him off, then understands what he has found. Meanwhile Will and his friends fight a gang that includes one of Will’s childhood bullies. Police intervene. Will is charged with assaulting an officer.
That charge is the engine of the movie. At Will’s court appearance, Lambeau watches him argue for pro se legal representation — Will defending himself, badly, on purpose. Lambeau arranges for him to avoid jail time on the condition that he study mathematics under Lambeau’s supervision and attend therapy.
Skylar, Harvard, and the Stanford Problem
At a bar, Will meets Skylar, a wealthy British student about to graduate from Harvard with plans for medical school at Stanford. Minnie Driver plays her. Skylar approaches Will first. She gives him her phone number.
The relationship gives the film its second argument: whether Will can let anyone close enough to matter. Skylar is leaving for California. Will’s answer to that is the movie’s answer to everything, and the film does not pretend it is a good one.
Sean Maguire Takes the Case
Will agrees to the deal. He then mocks his way through a series of therapists, including a court-ordered one played by George Plimpton. Lambeau, desperate, contacts Dr. Sean Maguire, his old college roommate, who teaches psychology at Bunker Hill Community College. Sean is from South Boston too.
Sean does not flatter Will. He challenges the defense mechanisms directly. In their first session, Will insults Sean’s deceased wife, and Sean threatens him. That is the movie’s real starting gun. Robin Williams plays Sean, and the performance won him Best Supporting Actor at the 70th Academy Awards.
The therapy scenes are the spine. Will can out-argue almost anyone in the room, and Sean is the first person who refuses to be impressed by it. The film’s tagline — “Some people can never believe in themselves, until someone believes in them” — is doing a lot of work, but the scenes earn it more often than not.
A Running Order of What Actually Happens
| Order | Event |
|---|---|
| 1 | Will solves Lambeau’s first blackboard problem anonymously |
| 2 | Lambeau posts a harder problem; Will solves it and is caught |
| 3 | Will and friends fight a gang; Will is charged with assaulting an officer |
| 4 | Will meets Skylar at a bar; she gives him her number |
| 5 | Court appearance; Lambeau arranges for Will to avoid jail time on the condition that he study math under Lambeau and attend therapy |
| 6 | Will mocks multiple therapists |
| 7 | Sean Maguire takes the case |
| 8 | First session: Will insults Sean’s late wife; Sean threatens him |
| 9 | Skylar prepares to leave Harvard for Stanford |
Ben Affleck Plays Chuckie Sullivan
Ben Affleck plays Chuckie Sullivan, a construction worker and Will’s loyal childhood friend. Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser play Morgan O’Mally and Billy McBride. Stellan Skarsgård’s Lambeau is the film’s most interesting supporting turn — a man who found the genius he spent his life looking for and cannot stand what he found.
The Screenplay Is the Reason to Watch
Affleck and Damon won Best Original Screenplay for this. The film earned nine Oscar nominations in total. That is the correct award to have given it. The structure is sturdy, the dialogue is better than the premise deserves, and the two leads carry scenes that could have been maudlin in worse hands.
Danny Elfman wrote the score. Elliott Smith contributed songs, including “Miss Misery,” which was nominated for an Oscar. The Smith needle drops are the film’s best formal decision — they keep the Boston scenes from turning into a montage of self-pity.
Where the film strains is in its tidy accounting. Will is a genius, a fighter, a janitor, a defendant, a boyfriend and a patient, and the movie wants all of those to resolve. Van Sant is a patient director, and 127 minutes is enough room, but not every thread gets the same care. The mathematics is a device; the therapy is the subject. The film knows this and still spends time on Lambeau’s professional jealousy that the therapy scenes could have used.
What the 7.1 Score Is Measuring
This is a very good movie with a very good performance at its center, and it is not a great one. Williams is the reason it works. Take him out and Sean Maguire is a plot function; with him, the man has a dead wife, a house, a temper and a reason to show up. That is the whole difference between a movie that wins two Oscars and a movie that gets remembered as a screenplay exercise.
It is a 1997 Miramax drama about a working-class genius rescued by an institution that spends most of the movie condescending to him, and its politics are softer than its premise. The best scenes are two people in a room, and the movie knows it, which is why the ending works.
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