Good Will Hunting Review

The screenplay is why this endures, and it is a young writers' screenplay in both directions. The good half is dialogue that actually sounds like people scoring points off each other, the bar scene, the construction site speech, the arguments in Sean's office that keep escalating past where a normal film would cut away. The weaker half is structure, a straight line from wounded genius to healed man with every station marked in advance, plus a romance that mostly exists to give Will something to run from.

Van Sant, coming off far stranger work, directs with almost no visible personality, and that discipline is probably correct. Matt Damon is very good and Ben Affleck is better than people remember in the smaller part. Robin Williams is on another level entirely, playing grief as something a man carries competently in public, and the park bench monologue lands because he underplays it against every instinct he has. The score is the one element that oversells. It is a sentimental film that earns its sentiment through conversation rather than incident, which is rarer than it sounds.