Of Lights and Bushels

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"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)

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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.

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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.

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"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.

Poking Fun at the Church

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Bethany (Linda Fiorentino): What's he like?

Metatron (Alan Rickman): God? Lonely. But funny. He's got a great sense of humor. Take sex, for example. There's nothing funnier than the ridiculous faces you people make mid–coitus.

Bethany: Sex is a joke in heaven?

Metatron: The way I understand it, it's mostly a joke down here, too.

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"Kevin Smith's 'Dogma' grows out of an irreverent modern Catholic sensibility," wrote Roger Ebert when "Dogma" premiered on this date in 1999, "a byproduct of parochial schools, where the underlying faith is taken seriously but the visible church is fair game for kidding."

When you look at it that way, it really is no surprise that George Carlin was in the cast — as a bishop who tries to modernize the church's image with a "Catholicism WOW!" campaign and a masses–friendly Buddy Christ.

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Anyone who ever heard Carlin's "Class Clown" album knew he was a natural for the church ribbing of "Dogma." Frankly, I would have been disappointed if he had not been in it. I'm sure he got a kick out of all the inside jokes that probably had many Protestants scrambling for a Catholic catechism.

"For those reared in such traditions," continued Ebert, "it's no reach at all to imagine two fallen angels finding a loophole to get back into heaven."

That was the real premise of the story. The fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) had been exiled to Wisconsin and thought they had found a loophole in church teaching that would allow them back into heaven — through plenary indulgences being offered to anyone who entered Carlin's cathedral.

As Ebert observed, there are times in "Dogma" when a certain amount of Catholic education — or, at least, exposure to church teaching, if one is not Catholic — is required. Ebert pointed out that "not everybody knows what a plenary indulgence is." I grew up in a Protestant household and attended public schools; if it hadn't been for the fact that my father was a religion professor, and through him I was exposed to a lot of different faiths, I probably wouldn't have known what a plenary indulgence is. But I did.

Consequently, I probably grasped where the story was going before most non–Catholics in the audience did, even those watching at home with the luxury of pausing the tape or DVD and looking up theological definitions before proceeding.

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Loki (Matt Damon): Church laws are fallible because they're created by man.

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The greater problem with the plenary indulgences was this: if the fallen angels were allowed to re–enter heaven, God would be proven infallible, and all existence on earth would end. Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) was told that, as Christ's last surviving relative, it was her duty to prevent this from happening.

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In its way, I suppose, it was a modern–day Revelation.

I agree with Ebert. It helps to know a bit about Catholic teaching to get many of the jokes. Of course, I guess you could just listen to "Class Clown" before watching "Dogma."

Finding a Needle in a Stack of Needles

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"It's like finding a needle in a stack of needles."

Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks)

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There are certain scenes in certain movies that just stand out in one's memory. Quite often, it seems, those scenes occur in war movies.

For example, if "The Deer Hunter" is mentioned, the scene that probably leaps to mind is one of the Russian roulette scenes — which I still think were the most intense, most riveting scenes I have ever watched. Or if you're talking about "Apocalypse Now," the scene you may be most likely to recall is the one where Robert Duvall says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Such a scene — a lengthy one — occurred in "Saving Private Ryan," the Steven Spielberg flick that was showing on America's movie screens 15 years ago today.

I'm speaking of the re–creation of the invasion of Normandy, probably the most realistic depiction of modern war ever filmed. The chaos of the battlefield is evident for more than 20 agonizing minutes. You can almost smell the smoke — and the blood. There certainly is enough of it, but it became part of the landscape — as it probably does in real battles. And when the camera took us under water, there was almost a sense of relief that we had nothing to fear — until we saw bullets ripping through the water around us.

Every time I have seen it, I have felt the urge to look away — but I can't. It is gruesome, yet compelling — like a car accident or a train wreck or something similar we are powerless to prevent and incapable of not watching.

It's that kind of perverse fascination — and yet, a Spielberg movie is so much more intellectually satisfying. Watching the invasion of Normandy at the start of "Saving Private Ryan" is not merely some kind of a guilty pleasure or display of special effects prowess. It is an essential part of the story.

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But the landing at Omaha Beach really was only the beginning of the story of "Saving Private Ryan."

The war never really went away, and Spielberg did not shrink from showing it in all its brutality and ugliness. As I say, it was something that had to be told in the context of the larger story. When Spielberg made "Schindler's List," it wasn't necessary to show the violence, only to hint at it most of the time. "Saving Private Ryan" was a different kind of story.

Only those who deny the Holocaust do not know — or say they don't — the extent of the cruelty inflicted on so many. I suppose no one really denies that D–Day happened. Far too many men fought in it, and far too many men died in it.

Yet in the midst of all that gloom, there were some shining moments.

After the D–Day battle was over, it was discovered that three brothers had been killed, their mother was about to be notified of all three deaths at the same time, and a fourth brother, who had parachuted far behind enemy lines, was unaccounted for. He might not have survived the jump, or he might have been killed in action. No one knew.

But the decision was made that a squadron would be sent to look for him and, if possible, return him to his grieving mother. She had sacrificed enough. Thus began an improbable quest — to locate that surviving brother, Private Ryan (Matt Damon). Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) was dispatched with a squad to retrieve the soldier, a mission he compared to "finding a needle in a stack of needles."

Enthusiasm for the mission was relatively high at first, but then when the close–knit unit started losing men, some began to question the mission's validity.

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Capt. Miller: He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease or invent a longer–lasting light bulb.

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I thought "Saving Private Ryan" was a cinematic masterpiece with truly gut–wrenching scenes of combat that gave a realistic depiction of war and a genuinely moving finale. In the buildup to that finale, a dying Capt. Miller told Private Ryan to "earn this" opportunity he had been given to live.

I remember thinking, as I watched "Saving Private Ryan" the first time, how different that portrayal of combat was from the sanitized, gung–ho version my friends and I saw in the John Wayne movies of my childhood and tried to emulate in our games. Surely, this was a more honest representation of warfare, one that young people might respect — even in an age of dazzling special effects.

The same could be said of the ending, in which the now–retired Private Ryan visited the cemetery where Miller was buried. Recalling Miller's final words to him as he stood before Miller's grave, Ryan asked his wife to "[t]ell me I've lived a good life. Tell me I'm a good man."

He sought reassurance that Miller's sacrifice had not been in vain. He needed to know he had earned it.

He may not have cured a disease or invented a longer–lasting light bulb, but if he could believe he had lived up to Miller's expectations, it would all be worth it.

It was the most eloquent example of personal commitment and dedication I have ever seen.

Spielberg received — and deserved — the Oscar for Best Director, but "Saving Private Ryan" lost Best Picture to "Shakespeare in Love." That was sort of a split decision for me.

Many years ago, I remember pulling for "All That Jazz" to win Best Picture because I thought it was the most creative of the nominees. It wound up losing to what I felt was the most realistic portrayal of a common life experience — "Kramer vs. Kramer."

A couple of decades later, I found myself pulling for "Saving Private Ryan," which I believed was the most honest depiction of combat yet committed to film, but it lost to a movie that I thought was arguably the most creative nominee.

Ironic, huh?