Good Will Hunting

The equation was never the hard part

Will Hunting solves an MIT graduate-level problem left on a hallway chalkboard the way most people solve a crossword — quickly, privately, and without telling anyone, because being seen as gifted has only ever gotten him hurt. That's the film's real subject, and it's a smarter one than the "genius discovered" premise it wears on the poster. Math is the thing Will is good at. It is not the thing the film is about.

What the film is actually interested in is the specific defense mechanism of a kid who grew up in foster care and got hit enough to learn that leaving people first beats being left — a pattern the script, written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in their twenties, understands with an intimacy that a more polished screenplay might have sanded down.

Robin Williams, doing the least he'd ever done on screen

Williams' Sean Maguire is deliberately the stillest performance of his career up to that point, and it's exactly the right choice — a therapist whose entire method is refusing to be impressed by Will's intelligence, because intelligence was never what Will needed anyone to notice. The park-bench monologue about Vietnam, about staying up all night in a hospital, works because Williams plays it without a single joke reflex, letting a genuinely funny actor sit in a scene with nothing to perform.

Where the script simplifies

Skylar, Minnie Driver's character, is written mostly as a device to expose Will's fear of being truly known rather than as a person with her own trajectory — a fair complaint that's true of a lot of scripts from this era, and one the film doesn't fully escape even with a strong performance underneath it. The ending's optimism — Will driving west to go "see about a girl" — is a little tidier than the rest of the film has earned, though it's the kind of tidiness the film has spent two hours making you want.