Good Will Hunting

A film set in Boston. Will cleans floors at a university. He is twenty, came out of foster care, and drinks and fights with his friends. At night he solves a mathematics problem left on a board in a corridor. Nobody knows who did it. A professor finds him. Around the same time Will goes to jail after a fight, and the professor gets him out on conditions: he will work on mathematics and he will go to therapy. He drives off every therapist. The last of them, Sean, is the professor's old room-mate and teaches at a community college. From there the film is a series of conversations in rooms. Sean does not compete with him, does not read his file, and says nothing at all in the first session. There is also a girl. Skylar is studying medicine, and Will will not let the relationship happen. What the narrative is interested in is not intelligence but fear: Will tries nothing because trying might show him to be insufficient, and the film says so slowly. The long conversation in the park is the centre of the film and was written as one unbroken scene. Robin Williams told things in some scenes that were not in the script; one of the best known moments came out of that, and the other actor laughing was kept in the film. The screenplay is by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon wrote the first version as a class assignment at university, and the two won an Academy Award for it; Williams won for supporting actor. Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver and Stellan Skarsgård are in the cast. Gus Van Sant directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants well written dialogue and performance. Who it is not for: anyone looking for bleakness; the film warms at the end and some of its resolutions are easy.