The original title of Good Will Hunting is a pun. Good will, as in goodwill; Hunting, the main character’s surname; put the three words together and you have one young man’s story. The Chinese title translates the meaning but loses the game. The film itself did something cleverer than wordplay. For almost thirty years people have been debating how to heal trauma, and it simply laid one sentence on the table. It’s not your fault.
The setup reads like a fairy tale. Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT, mopping hallways, fixing toilets, and along the way solving the theorem on the corridor blackboard that the professors can’t crack. Math professor Gerald Lambeau pulls him out of a brawl and a jail cell on one condition: do math, and go to therapy. Will scares off one therapist after another. He can quote any book and cut down any person, until he meets Sean, played by Robin Williams.
The story off screen reads even more like a fairy tale. I went through the behind-the-scenes accounts and the reviews from the time. The first version of this screenplay was an assignment Matt Damon wrote for a playwriting class at Harvard. He wrote it as a film instead of a play and got a failing grade. Later he brought the story to his childhood friend Ben Affleck, and the two worked on it together. The idea of making the genius a janitor reportedly came from Affleck’s family. Ben’s father worked as a cleaner at Harvard. At the time both men were nobodies, sharing one apartment, often short on rent. Castle Rock bought the script for $600,000. The studio had other plans for the lead and wanted to swap in Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. The two refused to budge and insisted on starring in it themselves. Later Kevin Smith carried the project to Miramax, and Gus Van Sant took over as director. He said it was probably the best screenplay he had ever read.
The bet paid off. Made for $10 million, Good Will Hunting grossed $225.9 million worldwide. At the 70th Academy Awards it collected nine nominations. Best Picture went to Titanic, but it brought home two of the hardest statuettes, Original Screenplay and Supporting Actor. When Damon and Affleck walked up to accept, one was twenty-seven, the other twenty-five. For Robin Williams this was the only competitive Oscar of his career. Three other nominations before and after never turned into a second one.
So what did Sean do that the therapists before him couldn’t? The film’s answer is plain. Honesty. At a bar, Will quotes his way through humiliating a Harvard student hitting on a girl, telling him the $150,000 in tuition could have been spent on a dollar-fifty library card. Sean turns the move back on him. You can list every book written about Michelangelo, but you have never stood under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You can recite every sonnet, but you don’t know what it is to lose someone. Sean does not dodge. He talks first about his dead wife’s little quirks, about waking up in panic, putting his own wound on the table. That famous scene is shot this way. Sean says it’s not your fault, again and again. Will starts by brushing it off, grows irritated, then breaks down crying. Abandoned as a child, raised in foster homes, beaten, he had kept the whole bill in his own name. A few sentences cracked it open.
The film also has one line that takes no technique. Chuckie, played by Ben Affleck, is Will’s brother from the construction site. He says the best part of his day is those ten seconds pulling up to Will’s door. He genuinely hopes that when he steps out of the car, Will is already gone, off to somewhere bigger, without even a goodbye. Friendship here does one thing only. It pushes a person toward the light.
Not everyone is willing to give it full marks. Roger Ebert gave it three stars. The story’s direction, he said, is guessable early on; what holds the film up are the specific scenes, the dialogue, the performances. Some viewers say the film makes real therapy look too easy, that decades of wounds don’t heal through a few talks in a park. I take that point, and I still like the movie. In a two-hour story, few films dare to say it this plainly. What heals a person is one honest relationship. Talent and success cannot stand in for it.
At the end, Will does not show up on his first day of work. He gets into the car Chuckie and the boys fixed up, leaves a note, and drives west. In California there is a girl he loves. Sean is saved by the relationship too, walking out of the night of losing his wife. Seventeen years later Robin Williams died, and because of it many people watched the film again, returned to that office, and listened to that sentence one more time.
The film is nearly thirty years old. Douban still holds it at 9.0, IMDb at 8.3, and the number of people rating it grows every year. Most of us probably carry a spot somewhere that got hurt and then took the blame for someone else. It’s not your fault, only six words. The hard part is having someone look at you and say it once, then again, without giving up.