by Hadley Hury
ood Will Hunting is a coming-of-age story about a 21-year-old,
South Boston laborer who is a genius in the rough. The film also
marks the fairly wondrous, mutual coming-of-age of director Gus
Van Sant and co-writers and co-stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
Van Sant has been doing interesting work on the independent margins
for years (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy), but here he
achieves a sophisticated, clear-eyed coherence, and a passionate
cinematic heart for which his earlier films seem – like Will Hunting,
the unpolished human gem – only the roughest of outlines. Affleck
and Damon’s script, even when it resorts on one or two occasions
to cliche, has given this director some very rich spiritual, emotional,
and intellectual terrain to till, and what he brings to life is
one of the most revelatory films of 1997.
Damon – who is concurrently starring in John Grisham’s The Rainmaker
– inhabits the title role with a relentlessly watchable ferocity.
Will is an extraordinary young man torn between his past and future.
The film focuses on a period of several months in which researchers
at M.I.T. discover Will’s mathematical genius and photographic
memory, Will discovers love (with the charming Minnie Driver),
Will is finally forced to confront (with the help of a psychologist
played by Robin Williams) the demons of his past, and Will decides
whether he will continue as a Whitmanesque working-class man who
has the soul of a poet and the camaraderie of the blue-collar
friends with whom he’s grown up, or let his gifts carry him to
any one of a number of professional heights and a life seemingly
without bounds.
That is the plot. But that insufficiently describes what Good
Will Hunting is about.
One of its most startling aspects is that, for all the exceptional
gambits and ambitions of the story, Good Will Hunting bristles
with a sense of reality and romance with which most audiences
will identify. There is an uplifting wholeness at work here that
transcends the sometimes formulaic parts, bursting from the screen
in a heady mixture of powerfully written scenes, arresting performances,
and Van Sant’s galvanizing fluidity of style, emotional insight
for the material, and grace in working with the actors.
Williams gives, arguably, the performance of his career as the
therapist who wants Will to understand his past, keep his soul,
and liberate himself to a new future. They finally meet on a common
ground of vulnerability as Will brings the therapist’s own private
pain into the light, and in the end help one another break through.
(It’s time to note that, more than anyone making films today,
Van Sant seems to understand and movingly convey male vulnerability.
Good Will Hunting, like My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy
before it, keenly portrays the particularities of male friendships,
foibles, strengths, and weaknesses.)
Perhaps most exciting is the fact that Good Will Hunting was
written by such young men and directed by someone who has, until
now, been seen as a suspicious eccentric. This is a film in which
just about everything goes right, comes together, and takes on
a deeply felt and memorable life. Even its manipulations are honest,
earned, and – though without moral presumptions – for a larger
purpose. There’s wit; there’s operatic sentiment. You laugh; you
cry. This reviewer, as I expect will be true of many moviegoers,
found himself delighted to have been played, if like a violin,
at least as a Stradivarius.
Deconstucting Harry is the best Woody Allen picture in years.
One says “Woody Allen picture” because, like all the best auteurs,
Allen has, of course, been making the same film since he began
to put away his childish things – the inspired lunacy and surreal,
daringly ironic, slapstick of Bananas and Take the Money and Run
– and began at age 42, with 1977’s Annie Hall, and in just about
every film since, to deal with the great hoax, the grandest of
all illusions: growing up. This latest effort will be one of the
ones that ensures his place in the archives of cinema and in the
entertainment of generations of movie lovers to come. As a director,
he is America’s answer to Fellini; as an onscreen persona he is
a fretsome, navel-contemplating incarnation of Peter Pan as Intellectual
Jewish Manhattanite.
With Deconstructing Harry, Allen persists in his chronic need
to laugh rather than cry, to have us do so as well, and to beat
the critics (of his work, and more recently, the conduct of his
personal life) to the punch by pinning his fears and weaknesses
on the big screen for all to deride. Albeit self-absorbed and
insistent on projecting his bread-buttering neuroses, Allen is
almost modest here: He makes shrewd, self-effacing fun of himself.
A few film critics are rather snootily dismissing Deconstructing
Harry as just another exercise in artistic self-justification,
adolescent sexual obsessions, and pseudo-profound cliches about
art and life. It very well may manifest all of those elements
(and the last few minutes of the film do, indeed, come across
as a weak, philosophical stab at moralizing), but these disdainful
critics seem no longer capable of considering Allen’s films discretely
and have, armed with the highly publicized pecaddilloes of his
domestic affairs, now decided to view his work from that most
dangerous perspective that film critics can be heir to, that of
pop psychologist. Sad, that their insistence on biographically
based commentary (constructed from issues about which they can
never be certain) should preclude their seeing what we can know
with certain delight: that Woody Allen has arrived – moderately
morose, still whining, and with all his undisputed baggage continuingly
accounted for – alongside Keaton and Chaplin, in the first ranks
of American clowndom. Fortunately for most of us, we won’t feel
we have succumbed to the slippery slope of moral relativism by
enjoying Deconstructing Harry, one of Allen’s finest and funniest
films.
Allen plays Harry Block – a writer with (yes, indeedy) writer’s
block – who is self-absorbed, consumed with adolescent sexual
obsessions and admittedly pseudo-profound questions about art
and life. At worst, he callously uses the women in his life as
fodder for his fiction’s misanthropy; at best, he is spiritually
bankrupt. By film’s end, Harry may have grown only neglibly as
a human being, but he has at least come up with the premise for
a new book – a protagonist who is “a failure at life” but who
participates in the give-and-take of life through his characters.
Along the way, Allen artfully strings together some hilarious
situational comedy.
Picking over the traces – of both his perpetual themes, visual
and verbal humor, and, one may assume, his personal trials – he
manages to succeed this time out in his will to one-upsmanship.
The script is smart and funny; there’s an apotheosis of the familiar.
Many sustained scenes have long pedigrees, obvious set-ups, shaggy-dog
unfoldings, and shameless, vaudevillian, ta-dum! pay-offs. But
far from being arid, the film percolates with fresh energy. The
whole project seems tuned up several notches. (He even throws
in an occasional dash of magic-realism – a trend we thought now
mercifully resided on video-store shelves – and makes it work!)
Allen’s sense of timing has rarely been so audacious and audiences
may laugh as much at what’s being gotten away with as at what’s
going on.
The usual casting formula – a celebrity repertory of medium-
to cameo-sized roles – works more credibly here than on some previous
occasions. Judy Davis gets a couple of juicy scenes – they rival
her unforgettable “hedgehog” reverie in Allen’s Husbands and Wives
– in which to deploy her full range of eccentric, naturalistic,
stylistic, and just plain brilliant funniness. And in the role
of Harry’s former wife, a psychotherapist, Kirstie Alley is encouraged
to make a stunning comic silk purse of her customary sow’s ear
of overacting. The scene in which she interrupts a session with
a client to confront Harry for the sins of his past is deliciously,
and perfectly, over the top. Bob Balaban, Robin Williams, Elisabeth
Shue, and a host of others seem content with carrying a vignette
– or even the comic equivalent of carrying a spear – as the picaresque
silliness progresses.
Like Harry, Woody Allen may never create a film that moves us
to the quick with the greatness of its spirit, but – for all his
introspective angst and urban provincialism – he has articulated
his own vocabulary of the human condition, and audiences for Deconstructing
Harry may derive a deep satisfaction in watching one of America’s
great humorists working away at making a good thing better.
In a scene in which our sympathies are completely with her, Harry’s
former wife, the therapist, dismayed with Harry’s amorality, temporizing,
and what she sees as a pathological need to fictionalize life,
cries in exasperation, “For once, stop tap-dancing!”
From somewhere deep within us, we hear a sharp pang of human
hunger, that subversive small voice of classic comedy, whispering
– “No, don’t! Please don’t.” n