Best friend Chuckie (Affleck) parks his beat-up car outside Will’s house, walks to the door, and hands over a cup of coffee. Will makes that journey every morning, and his routine rarely wavers. And the neighborhood of Southie, Boston, although only a few miles away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, feels like the other side of the world. All of those exemplars of learning seem out of place in a rundown house with mismatched chairs in a mostly empty living room a broken TV, a broken microwave, and broken furniture on the front lawn and a pulled-up fence leaning precariously against the front porch. Then the mirage is punctured, and contextualized, by Will Hunting’s (Damon) reality. “Good Will Hunting” begins through a kaleidoscope: repeated reflections of weighty, leather-bound books, open to random spots and tossed aside equations and formulas, scrawled on all sorts of surfaces, their meanings indecipherable to most of us stacks of paper, not quite high enough to topple over, but just high enough to be hazardous. Of the walls we build up to protect ourselves, and of the people we trust enough to help us break them down. Of the loneliness of certain types of knowledge, and the mirrored loneliness of not possessing it.
Of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and foamy beer and drive-through burgers, bought for each other and shared with one another. Of unrelenting loyalty, and its companion, crushing honesty.
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Of friendship turned into brotherhood, and of the assumption that all free time is time meant to be spent together. A portrait of disaffected twentysomethings shooting the sh*t, day in and day out, in Boston’s working-class neighborhoods. “Good Will Hunting” is lyrically directed, efficiently written, side-splittingly funny, quietly devastating.
The film’s poignant exploration of living and loving is soothing at any time, but especially these times-when we yearn for comfort more than ever, and when “It’s not your fault” might be exactly what we need to hear.
Right now, when the world around us feels particularly overwhelming and the pressures of our everyday routines seem outside of our control, the healing nature of “Good Will Hunting” is a balm. What has perhaps gotten lost in the ensuing decades, though-possibly overshadowed by Damon’s flashier work with Paul Greengrass, Ridley Scott, and Steven Soderbergh, or by Affleck’s own career as an Oscar-winning director, or by the post-“ Justice League” memefication of Affleck as a public figure-is that “Good Will Hunting” is actually really damn good. The boyhood friends’ paths forward were set, and as each of their careers took off, they would intermittently appear onscreen together in the years to come. At the 70th Academy Awards, with the nine nominations for “Good Will Hunting” up against the 11 for “ Titanic,” Williams went home as the Best Supporting Actor and Damon and Affleck as authors of the Best Original Screenplay. The film was phenomenally successful, making more than $220 million on a budget of $10 million. Singer-songwriter Elliott Smith contributed six lovely, wistful songs to the soundtrack. Robin Williams, already tearing up the ‘90s with “Aladdin” and “ The Birdcage,” joined the cast. Beloved indie director Gus Van Sant came on to direct. Their script was passed by director Kevin Smith to the now-convicted-and-imprisoned Harvey Weinstein. But the childhood friends who became actors together were the magic that made “Good Will Hunting” work: their chemistry, their camaraderie, their bond. They weren’t, as far as we know, brawling with rival neighborhood gangs or crashing Harvard bars. Damon and Affleck both grew up fairly well off and involved in the arts. “Good Will Hunting” isn’t an autobiographical story.
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