I. Good Will Hunting is my Least Favorite Movie of All Time

“Art” can mean a lot of things. Almost anything, really. But surely it has never referred to the movies I saw at art cinemas in the late 1990s. Emma. The English Patient. Shine. Movies whose running times were spent complementing the audience on their fine taste in movies. Movies that feigned intellectual discourse by taking place in a foreign country or at a past time or by being based on a well-received novel. You know – middlebrow.

I was home from college for the summer when I saw Good Will Hunting. We watched it together, my family, on the couch in the den where the television was and where we spent most of our time together. The living room was reserved for guests we never had, and the Christmas tree. Middlebrow.

My parents – like most of the world – loved Good Will Hunting. But not me. No way. If Good WIll Hunting had just dressed up the cheap thrills of a coherent narrative in vague sentiments of educational merit, well, there was nothing novel in that. But Good Will Hunting was different. Good Will Hunting was insincere. Good Will Hunting was 126 minutes of Gus Van Sant encouraging his audience to congratulate themselves and then mocking them when they did so – with a sly wink at those of us cultured enough to “get it.”

That was me, all right. I was in college. I had read Walter Benjamin! I got it.

A movie that tells you you’re smart is a movie that appeals to people who want to be smarter, an audience that spends even its leisure time aspirationally. An audience that sends its children to expensive colleges, that believes in education as the surest path upward into the meritocracy. An audience that wants to better themselves and believes that such a thing is possible.

Suckers.

II. On Just Now Rewatching Good Will Hunting, Previously My Least Favorite Movie of All Time

As Will drives away from Boston we can feel safe assuming he ends up in California with a job and a girlfriend. It’s the promise the movie has made to us. We can assume that four years later, when Skylar graduates from medical school, Chuckie and Morgan are drinking beers across a pickup truck at a construction site. But the futures within movies take place in an infinite present. And fifteen years later Will Hunting will be fifteen years older in a world that’s never seen a Governor Schwarzenegger or a war in Afghanistan. Or the gentrification of Southie.

Clark the obnoxious graduate student thinks he can impress Skylar with his academic browbeating of two townies. But when Will proves more than his equal, Clark resorts to the sheer weight of social privilege. In the future – the future world of Good Will Hunting, where characters grow older but the year remains 1997 – we know that if Will and Clark meet at that drive-through it will be as two upper-class tourists. In the future where it is 2011 the joke is on a guy getting a Humanities Ph.D. who thinks he’ll end up making more money than anyone. In 2011 Clark gave up his part time adjunct position at Florida Gulf Coast University to go to culinary school, and the locally sourced lamb burgers he sells at a drive-though in Vermont have been featured in the New York Times Style Section.

He will never finish paying his student loans.

Will’s intelligence is unquestioned, but the opportunity to leave of Southie doesn’t present itself until he catches the attention of an MIT professor. His therapist teaches at a community college, but they only meet because the therapist’s MIT roommate was Professor Lambeau. Will’s relationship with Skylar isn’t just a relationship with someone who can recognize his intellectual gifts  – it’s a relationship with the people she’s met at “Private school, Harvard, and now Med. School.” You can get a Harvard education at the library for a dollar and fifty cents in late fees, but you can’t get the social contacts.

Good Will Hunting is the myth of the self-correcting meritocracy written by two guys who went to fancy colleges and had some personal interest in the continued relevance of that meritocracy’s institutions. And when I saw it as a college student – as an incipient if reluctant member of that meritocracy – I bristled. I bristled at the aesthetics I was in training to leave behind, and values that had sent me on my way. I bristled at the new aesthetics and expectations I was encountering, like I had entered a religious order and was only now realizing what vows I had sworn to uphold. And I realized, suddenly, on that old couch whose worn center springs pitched everyone towards the middle, amid shelves heavy with twenty volume collections of “the classics,” in the room with the television where we spent all our time, what it was I was losing.

But now, fifteen years later – now that meritocracy and its advantages are a distant smudge on the horizon – now I can’t bring myself to care.

Now I don’t hate Good Will Hunting very much at all.

III. But I May Have Overthought This

Images Cinema is currently showing The Help.

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This year I come to you (from my parents’ home, having dug through my teenage bedroom) with my original ticket stub from the first time I saw Good Will Hunting — January 31, 1998. (As it turns out, I truly throw nothing away.)

If I ever start a blog about Courage Under Fire, Saving Private Ryan, Jerry Maguire, or The Mighty Ducks 2, I also have those ticket stubs.

Which reminds me — remember how the unexpected success of Good Will Hunting sort of threw a wrench in marketing for Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998? Spielberg cast Matt Damon based on his impressive performance in Courage Under Fire, when he was still relatively unknown.

But when this previously little-known actor, who happens to be the title character of your film, becomes an Oscar-winning superstar, it becomes necessary to promote his forthcoming role. As I recall, there was supposed to be some dramatic tension as to whether Private Ryan was even alive and around to be saved. Damon doesn’t appear until the last act of the film, and at one point along the way Tom Hanks thinks he has found Ryan, when of course he hasn’t — because that guy was not Matt Damon.

That said, Matt did have a starring role in The Rainmaker, a big John Grisham film, which came out before Good Will Hunting (a couple months before). (According to the book Down and Dirty Pictures, it was this big break that ensured Miramax would give Good Will Hunting the final green light, despite a couple of kids insisting on director approval and leading roles.)

Still, when I saw Saving Private Ryan in the summer of 1998, I wasn’t worried at all about whether Tom Hanks would find Ryan — I knew he was going to show up, and was going to be played by Matt Damon (and not the-star-of-The-Rainmaker Matt Damon). Without Good Will Hunting‘s success he would have been just another emerging actor in an ensemble war film, and not someone who needed to be promoted on the poster as the-Matt-Damon-starring-as-Private-Ryan.

Think about it — what if Rosebed had won the Best Supporting Sled Oscar four months before Citizen Kane had been released? Orson Welles would have been pissed.

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Slate recently had an article on”10 wildly ambitious—or just wildly misguided—movie projects that were doomed by financial difficulties, casting issues, their very premise, or, commonly enough, all three,” including a version of The Lord of the Rings starring the Beatles.

Nestled in at number eight is the following, a film project I had not heard of until now. Hey, at least it wasn’t a musical.

Half Way House
After the triumph of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck found plenty of further success in acting, producing, and, in Affleck’s case, directing, but they have yet to film another Damon-Affleck script. Just months after GWH‘s release, they already had a project set up with Castle Rock. Affleck described Half Way House as an ensemble piece set in a home for the mentally impaired. The pair was going to play workers in the facility, at least initially. “Damon now tells Affleck he wants to play one of the retarded residents,” Variety‘s Army Archerd wrote in March 1998. “We’ve got 150 pages,” Damon told Entertainment Weekly that year, “and about five are good.” Whether he was being falsely modest or not, the film has been quietly dropped from both men’s list of future projects.

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Everyone’s giddy for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film Inception, including New York Magazine‘s culture blog “Vulture,” which has been looking over a bunch of newly released stills from the film.  This one (above) in particular had them considering the canon of great chalkboards of film and television, which inevitably lead them to one Good Will Hunting (as well as I Heart Huckabees, School of Rock, and The Simpsons.)

Check out their analysis, in terms of awesome/confusing/obsessive, here.

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In the summer of 2007 I went on a European adventure.  Late one evening, strolling the streets of Vienna, Austria, I encountered the above scene.  It was a grungy video store with a Good Will Hunting poster in the darkened window.  How odd it felt to encounter this very local-feeling film as a cheesy, sun-bleached cardboard display, four-thousand miles away from Boston.

There was also a slapdash tagline added to the poster — “Hol Dir Deinen Denk-Zettel an der Theke!” (Perhaps they simply swap in a language-appropriate tagline wherever in the world the display finds itself?)  Here in Austria the tagline was German — and translates to “Get Your Lesson in the Bar!”

Now, this isn’t an entirely accurate summing-up of the film’s themes.  American marketers used “Some people can never believe in themselves, until someone believes in them” and “Wildly charismatic. Impossibly brilliant. Totally rebellious. For the first 20 years of his life, Will Hunting has called the shots. Now he’s about to meet his match.”

“Hol Dir Deinen Denk-Zettel an der Theke” suggests a story of actualization through growing up on the street (and, well, yeah — in the bar.)  Sure, the bar part does describe Will and his crew, but Will Hunting would be content to sit around the bar not really changing at all.  He doesn’t really “learn his lesson” until confronted with his own potential, via Sean, Lambeau, and Skylar — none of whom are operating within his comfort zone.

So perhaps we should conclude that this is simply catering the film to a German market that likes to drink a lot (and likes its film protagonists to do the same)?

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I once jokingly referred to Miramax as “the house Ben Affleck built.” That’s not true. Miramax has existed since at least 1980. (My friend recently showed me a poster for a stoner Star Wars parody Miramax released that year. Think about that. They’ve been pulling the whole “Disaster Movie” genre schtick for 30 years!) Ben Affleck didn’t show up until the later half of the mid-90′s, but he was integral in the Miramax my generation came to know. His Oscar win alongside best bud Matt Damon in 1998 gave him some “indie film street cred” that no doubt rubbed off on Shakespeare in Love. He was certainly in the thick of things when Miramax became the Oscar juggernaut it’s commonly known as today.

No matter how high his star rose, Ben always kept it real with Miramax. Which is why I was so surprised to see him stay with Miramax after the Weinsteins left.

A little background for non-movie-industry-news-nerds: Miramax was founded by Harvey and Bob Weinstein. They sold it to Disney in 1993 but stayed on board as presidents to run the ship, as they always had. So it was an accepted truth that anyone who worked with Miramax regularly did so because they wanted to work with the Weinstein brothers.

When they left and created the Weinstein Company in 2005, all the other Miramax filmmakers and go-to actors went with them. Disney was left with little more than the Miramax name, installing a new president and beginning the “New Miramax” era, with practically a whole new roster of executives and creatives. Yet Ben Affleck chose to make Gone Baby Gone at the New Miramax.

I think this was a clever PR move.

Photo by Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

The average guy on the street who doesn’t read way too many movie blogs has no idea who runs Miramax. As far as the general population goes, Miramax was still Miramax. And actors, being public faces, come to be associated with brands in the public’s mind. In this case, the association goes something like this: “Ben Affleck + Miramax = some pretty good movies like Good Will Hunting(!).”

Ben used this to his advantage by allying himself with the Miramax name and not the Weinstein brothers. On the mean, indie film streets “Miramax presents a Ben Affleck film” sounds way more impressive than “The Weinstein Company presents a Ben Affleck film.” One reminds me of Good Will Hunting, and that Ben Affleck was once more than a headliner for mindless blockbusters and tabloids. It makes me root for the guy and probably give his movie a chance.

In January 2010, despite major Oscar wins under the new regime, Disney closed the doors on Miramax. The fate of the label remains a mystery, with rumors swirling that the Weinsteins would like to buy it back. But with Miramax off the table for the foreseeable future, I can’t help but wonder: what will Ben Affleck do when he needs to remind people of his indie street cred?

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I suppose it should be no surprise that while home for the holidays last fall, in going through folders of old papers, I came across a receipt for a notable purchase from February 23, 1998.  It was from my local record store on College Avenue, and on that day I purchased the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.

I can pretty honestly say this would become one of the most significant music purchases I’d ever make.  I didn’t really listen to music until late in high school… or maybe I did, but it was just the Aladdin soundtrack over and over again.  In tenth grade, though, I discovered my dad’s Beatles collection.  I went from there, largely basing my new tastes on that of my peers: Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, Billy Joel (River of Dreams, man).  I can tell you I was definitely not someone who “listened to Dave Matthews before everyone listened to Dave Matthews.”

I can also tell you that on that February day I did not go into Manifest Records to buy the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.  More likely, I was going primarily to get my very own copy of Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20.  Also predetermined, I picked out the Counting Crows’ August and Everything After.  Somewhat less so, I snagged the soundtrack for the movie Swingers.

Near the cashier was a display of what were probably new(ish) releases.  It speaks to how hurting I was for music suggestions that I picked up the CD soundtrack to a movie I had seen, and loved, but had only vaguely recalled the music. “I think I remember liking it,” I said to myself.

While Matchbox 20 lit up my CD player, Good Will Hunting was more of a slow burn.  When I gave it a first listen I found it nice and mellow — but it kind of “all sounds the same,” I thought.  Matchbox 20, on the other hand… each song blazed like a smash-hit single.  (In fact, five of the twelve songs were released as singles.)  Good Will Hunting, at least, made good background music.

But it stayed with me.

I don’t really associate it with those early months of 1998, but in following years it became a staple.  I fondly remember Good Will Hunting keeping me company on late evenings in my dimly-lit college dorm room.  If it was raining outside, it was twice as wonderful.

If not for that impulse buy, who knows how long it would have taken for me to find Elliott Smith?  And I felt like I really discovered him, rather than co-opting his catalog along with whatever else my knowledgeable peers recommended.

Elliott Smith has never been far from my ears this past decade, while Rob Thomas and Company burned out and then they faded away.

Nevertheless, I look back twelve years later and wonder: what if Good Will Hunting‘s soundtrack was populated by the songs of Matchbox 20, rather than those of Elliott Smith?

Last night I put together a little video.  I think it would have looked and sounded a lot like this…

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Turns out the upcoming Damon-Affleck project will likely be The Trade, the story of two New York Yankees in the seventies who swapped wives.  The blogosphere is all atwitter with the notion that we may soon see the Boston duo in pinstripes.

You can thank the crackerjack photoshop staff at the MTV Movie Blog for the image above.

Thanks to Adam, for the heads up on this one.

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One of the most-referenced sequences in Good Will Hunting is, of course, the “apples scene.”

As the boys stumble from the bar, crossing Bow Street, Morgan sees the ponytail jerk sitting in Dunkin Donuts.  Will goes over and initiates a little confrontational wordplay through the glass.  (In the screenplay it’s not a Dunkin Donuts, but another bar.  We also learn that the original “Harvard bar” was intended to be the now-nonexistent Bow & Arrow Pub.)

I was recently informed that in the new word game Appletters, from the makers of Bananagrams,  a player going out must yell “HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES.”  And so I’ve been wondering, beyond its popularization in Good Will Hunting, where does this idiomatic expression of smugness come from?

The Internet (Wikipedia) dates the phrase back to World War I.

It is likely that the phrase originated during the First World War, when allied soldiers used mortar shells known as toffee apples, because of their resemblance to the confectionery. After using them to successfully take out an enemy, soldiers may have yelled in a sort of victory cry, “How do you like them apples?”

Beyond its use in a John Wayne film and Polanski’s Chinatown, there’s not much of a pop cultural record of the phrase, though it has apparently been listed in idiom dictionaries since the 1920s.

It also seems that every newspaper or magazine article that discusses apples or Apple computers is required to use the phrase as its headline.  (Though it is best used by respected news sources who possess a photograph of a squirrel eating an apple.)

Interestingly, a peek into Google Trends indicates that the phrase “them apples” has received a large percentage of traffic from the fair city of Boston (data has only been kept since 2007).  In fact, our Commonwealth’s proud capital googles “them apples” more than any other city in the world. (Dublin, Ireland, comes in second.)

Yo Ireland, so, how do you like… oh — nevermind.

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And, I suppose, one could regard it as something like a sequel. It’s as if Morgan accompanied Will on his cross-country road trip and we find them somewhere in the southwest. And they’ve lost their accents. And Will got a haircut. And they don’t talk much. And–OK, in spite of the superficial similarities, I guess there’s not actually much of a connection between the two movies, despite how badly I was hoping to find one.

The beginning of the film, however, does almost seem like an oblique, teasing reference to the final scene in Good Will Hunting where we watch Will’s car disappear down the highway while Afternoon Delight plays and the credits roll. Gerry opens in much the same way—a car traveling down a road, through a dry desert-scape.

It’s like we’ve picked up right where we left off! It’s Good Will Hunting, but without the Afternoon Delight!

Alas, nearly immediately it became obvious that these were not Will and Morgan that we were dealing with. Gerry aspires to be a serious, high-art film: lots of long, unbroken takes; awkwardly long close-ups; long stretches where the only soundtrack is the sound of Damon and Affleck’s feet crunching against the gravelly desert ground for whole minutes at a time; grandiose, sweeping shots of the (admittedly stunning) scenery; and a deliberate vagueness as to who exactly our characters are and what they are doing.

It starts out with a long drive, as mentioned, and then our two heroes—both named Gerry—set out on a wilderness trail. They are headed for “the thing,” but after about 45 seconds they decide to “fuck the thing” and turn back. Unfortunately, within moments they manage to become spectacularly lost amidst an ever-changing backdrop of mountains, ravines, and desert scrub. No spoilers here, but you can probably imagine how this will end.

As for the script, I imagine it’s probably about 3 pages long—there isn’t much dialogue, and I got the impression that most of it was improvised.

Certainly, this is no Good Will Hunting, but it isn’t bad. I guess you could say my taste in film veers more towards the popular than the high-art, but in the end I still appreciated this film and its intentions. It’s earnest and thoughtful and interesting, and visually very beautiful.

And I bet Will Hunting would have loved it.

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Everyone knows who wrote Good Will Hunting.

In fact, it’s a big part of the appeal of the movie and the mystique surrounding it: the story of two relative-unknowns who, through hard work and talent, would make it big and go on to achieve lasting fame and cinematic glory—the story of two guys sitting on a winning lottery ticket.

But who really wrote Good Will Hunting?

According to the credits, of course, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting. They would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1997.

So who wrote what? Popular belief holds that Damon did the lion’s share of the work, with Affleck making only token contributions and then taking credit from his pal in the end—the screenplay was, after all, supposedly based on one of Damon’s collegiate short stories. (This Family Guy clip parodies the idea of Affleck’s meager contribution.)

And then there are those who dismiss the idea that it written by either young man, suggesting instead that their names were simply shrewdly tacked on to the script for marketing purposes by publicity-savvy producers. It was even the subject of an off-Broadway play called Matt & Ben, in which the two young protagonists mysteriously stumble across the unmarked script and go on to claim it as their own. William Goldman and Kevin Smith have both been put forward as the “real” screenwriters at various points.

Admittedly, if it was a publicity stunt, it wasn’t a bad idea. It makes a good story, after all: two hardworking, handsome young men working their way to fame and glory and positing themselves on the brink of superstardom through a story that stemmed from their working-class beginnings.

For those who think it’s unlikely that two pretty-boy amateurs could have written such a polished and successful script on their first try, perhaps their biggest argument is the mysterious absence of further collaborations from this seemingly very promising start.

To be fair, both Damon and Affleck have amassed additional writing credits under their belts since Good Will Hunting—Ben Affleck for two screenplays he adapted from novels, Gone, Baby, Gone in 2007 and The Town, currently in production. And Matt Damon, interestingly, would go on to collaborate with another Affleck—this time Ben’s brother, Casey Affleck, in the 2002 drama Gerry.

But in spite of these further accomplishments, there was a decided lack of another Good Will Hunting—certainly never another screenplay that was as beloved and universally celebrated, and never anything that brought them the acclaim (or the Oscars) that the Good Will Hunting screenplay garnered them.

So why is that? Perhaps it was the collaboration between them that created the spark, something that they couldn’t recreate on their own or with other collaborators. Or perhaps Good Will Hunting simply exhausted their creative resources. Perhaps it was the product of a time and a place that couldn’t be recreated: two optimistic and ambitious young men who had set out to accomplish their dreams and see the prize within their grasp, who create a story extracted from their collective backgrounds and experiences, and present it to a world that eagerly receives it. Maybe once they’d already achieved everything they could have possibly hoped for, there was no need for another Good Will Hunting. Why would you need to? And how could anything else live up to it?

Perhaps, sometimes, we simply only have one Good Will Hunting in us.

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It’s been interesting to see how much attention the guy with the ponytail in the Harvard bar scene is getting these days — he’s a spokesman for a gold reseller, and seemingly everybody cares. Every day on Twitter someone mentions his ads for Goldline (and describes him as the dude from the Good Will Hunting specifically).  This blog has been getting a decent amount of traffic for people searching for “good will hunting guy goldline ads” and similar searches.

Also, Winters (ponytail guy) is hardly just an actor in a role for Goldline; he has described himself as a “long-time client.”  It’s not hard to conflate his Harvard Ponytail Guy persona with his identity as a public figure — in short, a pompous, wealthy conservative.

Stephen Colbert recently did a spot-on send-up of the recent right-wing paranoid rush to stock up on gold.  I was criticized for poking fun at Winters and his gold commercials.  It’s nice to have Colbert and John Slattery chiming in.

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Watch the videos on YouTube, particularly the one on Market Stability, where Winters fondles gold lovingly.  Apparently gold looks like an ipod!

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Not long after Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester was released, I was discussing the director with my friend Brendan, at a rooftop party in Brooklyn. (I included that last detail so you’d know that I am — or at least have been — or at least think I may have been — cool.)

With Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester under his directorial belt, we envisioned Van Sant’s next film…. We suggested it be an autobiographical bio-pic in which a brilliant young filmmaker overcomes adversity to find his own voice (with the help of a mentor character who doesn’t quite follow the rules). The experienced and uninspired Van Sant, as mentor, must confront the commercialization of his recent films and the accompanying loss of passion for his work… together, mentor and student, they learn to reject the Hollywood system and find their own way.

The name of the film: Running Out of Gerunds.

Now, no one ever thinks this is nearly as brilliant and funny as we did.  (And I realize now that “finding” in this instance is probably not actually a gerund, but a present tense verb.  The hubris of youth!)  Nevertheless, I love the joke dearly.

To be fair, it is certainly notable that Van Sant took the clout he earned with the success of Good Will Hunting and went ahead and made a big fat failed experiment of a movie that is probably only successful as commentary on the intersection of the low-budget-and-scrappy and the movie-star-laden-and-over-marketed.

Only because of Good Will Hunting did anyone let Van Sant make Psycho.

A few years later he returns to commercial filmmaking.  In a way Finding Forrester is simply a sequel to Good Will Hunting, and as Van Sant explains in an interview with The Believer, “The most interesting films that studios want to be making are sequels. They would rather make sequels than make the originals, which is always a kind of a funny Catch-22.”

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Scott William Winters — you know him as Clark (the pony-tailed participant in the “how do you like them apples” exchange in GWH) — is back! 

Turns out he often plays jerks like Clark, and has a jerk family.  His brother, Dean Winters, plays Liz Lemon’s ex-boyfriend (and jerkwad) Dennis Duffy on 30 Rock.  And just yesterday I saw the last of four episodes of 24 in which Scott William Winters plays a jerk from the FBI who doesn’t respect civil liberties. 

Well it seems Scott has also just become a spokesman for Goldline International, “a leading gold and precious metals trading company.” 

Scott says:

It’s a pleasure to represent such a reliable and trustworthy source for investing in gold and silver. As a long-time client of Goldline, I have first-hand experience with their superior customer care, quality products, and how easy they make it to buy gold. I look forward to encouraging other investors looking to diversify their portfolios with gold to work with Goldline.

Whoa. 

The new Goldline commercials starring Winters have yet to hit the YouTubes, but we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out. 

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This the fast life, we are on a crash course,
what you think I rap for, to push a fucking Rav 4?
But I know that if I stay stunting,
all these girls only gon’ want one thing,
I can spend my whole life good will hunting,
only good gon’ come is it’s good when I’m …

…Ahem. (Morgan, get the baseball glove.)

Listen to the track on Jay-Z’s MySpace page. View the complete lyrics (well, they also trail off, not completing the lyric in question… so squeamish!) on KillerHipHop.

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All these Twitter posts about Boys Poker Night were actually about Damon and Affleck playing poker. Like, with Brad Garrett. 140 characters, your tendency to lack clarity strikes again!

Boys Playing Poker is a stupid name for a movie anyway. It’s no “Rounders”.

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Last spring Apple ran an ad with some genuine GWH subtext, as noted by blogger Gabe Jacobs. Have Matt and Ben made their mark upon the very language of psychotherapy? Move over, “how does that make you feel?”!

Does this make Minnie Driver a Mac? Because Skylar totally would be.

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