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BY DALE E. BASYE, dbasye@wweek.com
Of Gus Van Sant's many creative gifts, his most profound is a sharp eye for talent--especially fresh, strapping young men whose hunky flawlessness masks a trembling vulnerability. But like Bruce Weber and Larry Clarke with their edgy visions of youth's ephemeral bloom, Van Sant is able to turn his minor-key obsessions into rarefied art. He's a brilliant voyeur whose personal gravity comes less from conventional charisma than from a quiet, understated power laced with an intensity of focus: a laconic, modern-day Warhol surrounded by a moat of detached mystery, ensnaring a dynamic young entourage yearning for self-liberation and validity. Not since that legendary pale appropriator has someone so thoroughly and effortlessly deconstructed our pop-culture hierarchy. Van Sant's "soup cans" are teen idols--impossibly pretty cover boys like Keanu Reeves, Matt Dillon, the late River Phoenix and now, with his latest film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon--recontextualized by Van Sant's homoerotic apotheosis into works of art that demand a fresh interpretation. Unlike Warhol, though, Van Sant is truly an artist. Painter, writer, filmmaker, musician--whatever the medium, Van Sant's weary innocence and extraordinary eye for the details of daily life inscribe his work with a personal vision that retains its originality despite its eclecticism. Good Will Hunting is vivid proof that Van Sant can dip into the mainstream without losing his vision in its uncompromising current. Will Hunting (Damon) is a pugilistic, South Boston orphan endowed with an Einsteinian knack for brain-melting math problems. A voracious, unschooled book eater, Will is shackled to his blue-collar lifestyle by the restless internal demons of past abuse, using his magnificent brain to sop up cheap beer, talk his way into brawls and push a mop around the hallowed halls of MIT. When prize-winning math professor Lambeau (Stellan SkarsgÂrd) leaves an especially difficult problem on a blackboard for his whiz-kids to solve, Will anonymously chalks in the answer. A Mensa-level Cinderella story ensues, with the awed Lambeau finally meeting Hunting just as the wunderkind is jailed for assault. Lambeau, supportive but subtly jealous, bails him out on the condition that Will nurture his gift for numbers and get some therapy to reduce the gargantuan chip residing on his muscled shoulder. Chewing up a number of New Age quacks and Harvard shrinks with a sarcastic "Let the healing begin!" (including an over-the-top cameo by George Plimpton, who scolds, "No more shenanigans, no more tomfoolery, no more ballyhoo!"), Will meets his match in the form of South Boston psychiatrist Sean McGuire (Robin Williams). McGuire is a haggard, stocky cross between Williams' Dead Poets Society character and Dostoevsky, a man who would rather flee from the day than seize it. It's a testament to Van Sant's power as a director that Williams is so "behaved," nearly scared shtickless. Hunting is searching for something--love, camaraderie, challenge, a surrogate father, a place in the world--but this latter-day Holden Caulfield is too frightened to play the winning hand that fate has dealt. As McGuire cracks Will's scarred shell, the young man realizes the vast difference between knowledge and wisdom, and that life is richer--and far more terrifying--when experienced first-hand. Also helping Will find the "good" in himself are his girlfriend, vivacious pre-med student Skylar (Minnie Driver), and his best bud Chuckie (Ben Affleck), who--in one of the film's most potent scenes--tells his friend how he dreams of the day when Will suddenly vanishes, leaving his dead-end life behind to become something great. Playing his role with an understated emotional edge, Damon (who co-wrote the script with Affleck) is so poised and good-looking that he verges on neoclassical: Imagine a World Wrestling Federation version of Leonardo DiCaprio. But despite his physical beauty, Damon's subtle intelligence and easy charm make him "just one of the guys." Damon--despite his intimate relationship to the script--is most effective in speechless "linking" scenes. The image of Will sitting silent on a train as Boston whizzes past conveys his freakish isolation more effectively than the often melodramatic, ham-fisted dialogue can. Luckily, Van Sant has never relied too heavily on dialogue, instead excelling at the alchemy of transitory moments--fits of hormonal color and montages of hallucinogenic calm that gracefully flail at the ineffable. Though there are no stylized thrills such as the superimposed snowstorm of pills in Drugstore Cowboy or the whirling, crashing barn of My Own Private Idaho, scenes such as a street fight expressed in a string of stark still-lifes (reminiscent of the tableau sex-scene in Idaho) and a wrenching break-up strobed by harsh incandescent lighting are examples of hyper-realism that border on the surreal. One emerges from Good Will Hunting with an odd, teary sense of loss and a lump of half-swallowed sentimentality stuck in one's throat. It's something of a shock: Usually, you leave a Van Sant film wanting a brisk, purifying shower, not possessed by an overwhelming urge to hug strangers and mend lapsed friendships. Though Norman Mailer once disparaged sentimentality as "the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment," in Van Sant's hands it becomes something almost avant-garde. Good Will Hunting might not be Van Sant's strongest work, but its oblique ambition and covert artistry make this sappy mainstream fairy tale--strangely--his most experimental film to date. |
