"You'll have bad times, but it'll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren't paying attention to."
Sean (Robin Williams)
If you judge solely on the basis of Academy Award nominations and/or wins, "Good Will Hunting," which premiered on this day in 1997, was Robin Williams' best movie.
It may well have been.
When Williams died, I visited Facebook and all my friends were sharing the titles of their favorite Robin Williams movies. And they were all great choices, too. Everyone has a different fave, and it is a tribute to Williams' remarkable talent that so many of his movies made such lasting impressions on people. That is quite a legacy.
I would have picked different movies (I couldn't narrow it down to only one), but I could live with "Good Will Hunting," which was mentioned frequently that night. I only wish I had seen it sooner. It was a powerful performance, and it brought Williams his only Oscar.
That was the year that "Titanic" seemed to sweep the Oscars, collecting 11 awards (14 nominations in all) — but "Good Will Hunting" made its mark, receiving nine nominations and winning two awards. Williams was honored for his acting, and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who also appeared in the movie) were rewarded for their screenplay. (Damon was also nominated for Best Actor but lost to Jack Nicholson in "As Good as it Gets.")
I suspect there were lots of folks in the last decade or so who could empathize with Will Hunting (Damon). In the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of people probably found themselves working at jobs that didn't match their intellectual predispositions. In those days you found many people with college degrees who were flipping burgers and waiting tables. Still do in some places, I suppose.
But those people were forced to do so by circumstances. Will Hunting was not. Not really. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant individual, and yet he worked as a janitor at MIT — apparently by choice. Why was that?
Well, that was at the heart of the problem — and the movie. The answer wasn't easy to find.
Will Hunting seemed to provide an answer when he spoke admiringly of people who were engaged in manual labor. In his mind, that was real work and worthy of respect and admiration. Mathematics, on the other hand, was not real work. Not to him. Real work required effort.
Will made finding answers look easy. At the beginning of the movie a math professor (Stellan Skarsgard) challenged his students to solve a complex mathematical problem that took multiple chalkboards to present. The professor told the students that few people had been able to solve the problem over the years.
The answer was found written on a board in the hall outside the lecture room the next morning. None of the professor's students would admit to having written it; turned out that Will had written it.
Among other things, there is frustration in being able to see true genius in others and pursuing it yourself but falling short. To be fair, the professor had experienced a certain amount of success in his field, but like Salieri in "Amadeus," he was bewildered when he saw someone who was truly gifted and for whom the application of that gift was effortless but who was almost casual in his treatment of it.
There were many people who tried to help Will find his way — the professor, one of Will's childhood buddies (Ben Affleck), a girl he met (Minnie Driver).
And then there was a therapist (Williams), who had been the professor's college roommate and stood in awe of the professor's intellect. The professor reached out to the therapist when Will ran afoul of the law as a condition for Will's release.
As Williams and Damon explored Will's psyche, it became a journey of discovery for both characters.
Damon's character was driven in part by an affinity for his old friends and neighborhood and in part by emotional injuries suffered earlier in his life. Childhood was clearly a mixed bag for Will.
Williams' character had his own wounds, and he helped Will get on the road to recovery by sharing them. Damon and Affleck put the words in Williams' mouth, but they were good words, and he delivered them with such feeling that the audience believed them to be true. In some ways, I think they were.
"Good Will Hunting" also received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Gus Van Sant), Best Actor (Damon), Best Supporting Actress (Driver), Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Original Song and Best Film Editing.
Had it not been for the language in the movie and the release of "Titanic" a few weeks later, I am convinced that "Good Will Hunting" would have been a bigger Oscar winner in the spring of 1998 — although I am less convinced that it was the best movie of the year. A blockbuster like "Titanic" can come along and overwhelm everything else at any time.
As for the language, well, it wasn't pleasant, but it is an undeniable fact of life that people use those words in everyday conversation — a lot more than they did just a few decades ago. It is realistic for characters to use that kind of language in movies — but it probably was not as commonplace in 1997 as it is today.
Thus, while "Good Will Hunting" was not the big Oscar winner a couple of decades ago, it might well be if it was being released today — even with "Titanic" in the mix.
