So yeah this is a film that everyone has watched but I haven’t. In fact I didn’t even know what it’s about, only that it was basically made by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and it was both a critical and a commercial success. Its director is Gus Van Sant but I feel that he was brought in to work on spec on what is very much a project led by Damon and Affleck. My own opinion is that it’s easy to see why people liked it but it’s way overrated.

Will Hunting works as a janitor at MIT and hangs out with friends who do similar blue-collar jobs. When professor Gerald Lambeau posts a mathematics challenge, Will anonymously solves it. Lambeau discovers his identity when he catches him scribbling on a blackboard and determines that he is a self-taught genius. When the police catch Will and his friends fighting with another gang, Lambeau arranges to supervise him and for him to submit to therapy in order to avoid prison. He finds that Will easily surpasses him in mathematics but is uncooperative with psychologists. Eventually he sends Will to see an old college friend of his, Sean Maguire, who comes from a similarly troubled background. Meanwhile Will grows close to a Harvard student, Skylar, who falls in love with him but his own psychological hangups prevent him from reciprocating.

Matt Damon apparently wrote the script for this while taking a course and Ben Affleck helped him finish it. It’s an impressive achievement no doubt to be able to write something like this right off the bat but this is the work of relatively young people and it shows painfully. Their idea of how a genius operates looks very impressive but contradicts everything that we know about real life geniuses. It’s absurd that Will is equally talented in such disparate fields as history, chemistry and mathematics. It’s downright ridiculous how he has seemingly read everything but the film never shows him actually reading anything. Instead he spends time working a construction job, doing relatively normal things like goofing with his friends and dating with Skylar. It’s like knowledge about the world is beamed straight into his head while he’s asleep or something. Especially insulting is the film’s insinuation that just because he’s good at something doesn’t mean that he’s interested and passionate in it. That is just not how all the geniuses in history that we know about work.

Apart from this lack of understanding of geniuses and indeed how the world works, there’s also an obsession with slick dialogue, like the line about ‘got to see about a girl’. One scene has Will telling a joke to Sean that involves being on a plane but Sean points out that Will has never been on a plane. Ironically every story in this film feels like that, from Sean’s story about 1975 World Series to Will’s friend Chuckie telling him he hopes to go up to his house one day and see that he isn’t there. It’s a very writerly conception of how stories ought to be entertaining and heartfelt but they don’t ring true in the least. Then there’s how the film treats the issue of Will’s psychological trauma. Will basically is able to live a perfectly ordinary life. It’s just that his internal issues prevent him from making use of his genius. That is so demeaning to people who have real and not made up issues who would be content if only they could live normal lives.

I won’t deny that there is a lot of acting talent in this film and everything is put together very well. It’s enjoyable and entertaining to watch and superficially its themes feel wholesome enough so it’s no wonder why so many people liked it. But nothing in this stands up to close scrutiny and now that we have seen so many other films with much more realistic depictions of mental illnesses, I doubt that this title would have earned so welcome a reception if it had been released today. In essence, this is a fairy tale movie. It’s nice enough to watch but it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously at all.