The Genius of Good Will Hunting

Ben and Matt

In advance of the 20th anniversary, I am posting a critique of the Matt Damon, Ben Affleck breakout film, Good Will Hunting. I saw the movie in the theaters back in 1997 when Bill Clinton was president and beanie babies were all the rage. Rotten Tomatoes rates the film at 97% from critics. Now a lot of movies that one sees in their youth have a different feel when viewed later after you have gone through decades of events that life tosses your way. You grow, you mature, you embrace life on the journey to your first colonoscopy. When I was younger, I thought Good Will Hunting was terrible. I recently watched it again, and I can say, now that I am a more introspective person, a husband, a father, that the film stinks even more than ever.



Will Hunting is a super smart, lost boy who aspires to be a janitor at MIT. In the opening scenes, he's speed reading a book. Initially, I thought he was leafing through a magazine that was uninteresting to him, maybe the current issue of Janitor Monthly. Later we learn that Will can recall any page in any of the thousands of books he has lining his shelves because he's way smart. Now, I know there are people who have what is called a superior autobiographical memory which allows them to recall just about anything that ever happened to them. This concept might not have been floating around in 1997, but Will has the added ability to understand all these technical topics as well as recall everything he has previously read. He's wicked smart.

The Hollywood version of genius is always that of the consummate slacker, the guy who doesn't have to study, but can ace any test. The myth of intrinsic intelligence is revered while the more realistic notion of committed study is dismissed as commonplace. According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, a book chronicling the factors that lead to extraordinary achievement, it takes 10,000 hours of hard work to enter the stratosphere in any field. Real genius takes a lot of tenacity, and it's this dedication that marks true brilliance.

In the film, Will explains his super smarts to his girlfriend Skylar, played by Minnie Driver, by comparing himself to Mozart. He says that Mozart could just play the piano because it made sense to him, and it's like that for him with organic chemistry. Problem is Mozart practiced his ass off at a very young age. His father was a composer and teacher. True, Mozart had a natural gift for music, but it was this gift that drove him to work hard, carrying him to extraordinary levels. His father wasn't breaking his cassinettes to practice.

Will Hunting is a natural at mathematics and organic chemistry. The issue I take with this is that no one is born with math nor organic chemistry prewired. Worse yet, Skylar, a premed student, laments about how she hates organic chem. I hope she became a dermatologist because I wouldn't want someone like her cutting into me. A few personal friends of mine are medical doctors, and they all enjoyed organic chemistry. That's why they're doctors.

Will even offers to do Skylar's homework for her like he could just jump in mid semester and bang out her college level organic chemistry problems in between buffing floors and freeing up clogged toilets. Being a janitor, he probably had plenty of free time on his hands so I'm sure he spent it perusing college level text books. Now to be fair, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck farted out this script as freshman, Damon at Harvard and Affleck at the University of Vermont. They never graduated so it's doubtful how absurd this concept was to them.

Will had been solving some tough math problems left on a whiteboard in the hallway by Professor Lambeau, the scarf and ascot wearing math teacher who occasionally tries to use his number two pencil on young female students. When Lambeau and his grad student, Tom, discover the janitor scribbling the solution to a difficult problem on the board, Lambeau confronts him. Will avoids the pair by dropping an f-bomb and scurrying away, disappearing in the bowels of the building like a phantom janitor.

Will runs into some cavone on the basketball court who tormented him in kindergarten. Talk about holding a grudge. He beats the guy so badly that when the dude comes to his cannolis are stale. I didn't grow up in Southie, but where I came from if some Irish scrapper broke an Italian's face, he would have woke up the next day spooning with a horse head. The cops show up, and Will scuffles with the boys in blue. You can tell this movie is 1997 because today if you tussle with the police, they are highly likely to put a few caps in your gut, then turn in their guns for two weeks of relaxing desk work.

Lambeau pulls some strings so Will avoids jail time if he sees a shrink. Queue the late Robin Williams as Sean, a community college psychology teacher who lost his wife to the big C. Sean and Will don't hit it off. In an early exchange they just stare at each other. This battle of wills was especially inept for the viewing audience who also just gets to stare at them staring at each other. When I saw this scene for the first time in the theatre, I didn't know it was coming otherwise I would have hit up the candy counter for more rasinettes. Eventually, Will begins to open up telling Sean that he's an "orphan," a bit of a dated word if you ask me. I kept waiting for Oliver Twist to round the corner and ask for more porridge. Will also had a dick for a foster father who gave him the choice of being beaten with a wrench, a stick or a belt. Will chose the wrench just to show him he was unafraid. Apparently, social services was not exactly monitoring the situation too closely if a foster parent was using tools on their charge.

Lambeau and Will start mathing it up together. In one scene they are impressively cancelling terms at breakneck genius speed. They slap down low in celebration as both admire the equations on the board. Lambeau weirdly puts his arm around Will, then begins rubbing his head in a way that would have made me very uncomfortable. I thought Will wanted to stay out of prison to avoid that kind of thing. Tom, Lambeau’s graduate student, apparently takes umbrage to the growing mutual affection. What tanks this scene is that the math is ninth grade polynomials which I'm sure was fresh in the minds of first year college students. If you want some impressive math at the MIT level, you have to roll out something more difficult than algebra.

The bar scene is when Will mixes it up with a student over an article they both read. The dude says,

"You’ll be serving my kids fries in a drive through on our way to a skiing trip." Will retorts, "That may be, but least I won’t be unoriginal."

This is a perfect example of what is called "stilted dialog," a common screenwriting criticism. When has anyone in any circle used "unoriginal" in a riposte? Additionally, I never understood the issue here. Damon and Affleck think reading, comprehending and quoting some obscure article on global economics is not real intelligence? Most people form their opinions from watching YouTube. Reading a white paper and absorbing the tenets is an integral part of research since you have to do a peer review when you publish a paper. The cap to this scene is when Will gets the girl’s math and says,

"Do you like apples?"

The guy says, “Yeah.”

Will retorts, "Well, I got her numba. How do you like those apples?"

If I said that around my buds back in the day, they would have collectively beat my ass just for being so lame. If I was that dude, I would have replied,

“That’s good because you’re gonna need apples, a salt lick and a feedbag."

The big breakthrough in therapy comes when Sean repeatedly tells Will,

"It’s not your fault.”

Will gives his best "Don't fock with me” then, eventually breaks down and sheds some tears because in Hollywood all psychological problems are solved with a good cry. Sean, being the great psychoanalyst at the local community college, hugs it out with Will. Afterwards, all is good. Problem solved. Who knew mental illness was so easily resolved? 

Affleck's big scene is when he somehow arranges a meeting with the employees of a tech company that Will is supposed to interview with. He extorts $200 out of these guys which they have to pay if they want to interview Will. I worked many years in the computer science field, and it's doubtful these mid-level managers, talking to Affleck, could get a company to pony up $200 to interview a janitor even if he used Lambeau as a reference.

In one scene, Lambeau asks grad student Tom to make everyone a cup of coffee. Four years of college in a tough subject like math, soldiering thru the GMAT, coming up with original research and Tom gets to make coffee for the janitor. Will at one point dismantles one of Lambeau's colleagues with a killer math proof, and Tom comforts the guy by saying that he’s a smart man and that some people just get lucky. The guy leaves as the door closes quietly behind him. Will has a smirk on his face clearly rubbing it in. Tom should have said,

"Say Will, when you finish up with that cup of joe, some frat boys blew cookies in the men's room."

Will sets fire to a proof that he casually whipped out. He drops it to the floor as he says,

"You're right, this is probably a total waste of my time."

Ironically, that's what I thought while sitting in the theatre. Lambeau pathetically jumps to the floor and puts out the fire, saving the precious math proof. In reality, the sprinkler system would have gone off causing millions of dollars of damage to the MIT math lab. Will would have got canned then spent the rest of his life a filthy homeless dude wandering the streets of Boston yelling at himself.

Harvey Weinstein, cofounder of Miramax, promoted Good Will Hunting with an aggressive "oscar campaign." The film went on to win an oscar for best original screenplay as well as best supporting actor for Robin Williams, his only oscar. Ninety-four percent of the users on Rotten Tomatoes liked the flick. Most of my friends and colleagues who did crappy in college love this film. It's as though the movie gives all the goof offs an escape from the simple fact that they partied too much and studied too little. It's not surprising that a lot of people liked this film because the way the math works out, most people are average, and as such only two percent of the population are true geniuses.

I'm sure they are in the six percent that didn't like Good Will Hunting.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on September 27, 2016.