Good Will Hunting

Will Hunting, a janitor at MIT, has a gift for mathematics but needs help from a psychologist to find direction in his life.

• Director:Gus Van Sant
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:127 minutes

Cast

Robin Williams : Sean Maguire
Matt Damon : Will Hunting
Ben Affleck : Chuckie Sullivan
Stellan Skarsgård: Prof. Gerald Lambeau
Minnie Driver : Skylar

Though Will Hunting (Matt Damon) has a genius-level intellect, eidetic memory and a profound gift for mathematics, he works as a janitor at MIT and lives alone in a sparsely-furnished house in a rundown South Boston neighborhood. An abused foster child, he subconsciously blames himself for his unhappy upbringing and turns this self-loathing into a form of self-sabotage in both his professional and emotional lives.

In the first week of class, Will solves a difficult graduate-level problem taken from algebraic graph theory that Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), a Fields Medalist and combinatorialist, leaves on a chalkboard as a challenge posed to his students, hoping someone might find the solution by the end of the semester. When it is solved quickly and anonymously, Lambeau posts a much more difficult problem – one that took him and his colleagues two years to prove. When Lambeau chances upon Will writing on the board, he chases him away. However, Lambeau realizes Will wrote the correct answers and sets out to track him down.

Meanwhile, Will gets revenge on a bully named Carmine Scarpaglia, who, according to Will, used to beat him up years ago in kindergarten, and he now faces imprisonment after attacking a police officer who was responding to the attack. Realizing Will has enormous potential, Lambeau goes to Will’s trial and intervenes on his behalf, offering him a choice: either go to jail, or be released under Lambeau’s personal supervision to study mathematics and see a therapist. Will chooses the latter, even though he does not believe he needs therapy.

Will treats the first five therapists Lambeau has him see with utter contempt. In desperation, Lambeau finally calls on Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), an estranged old friend and MIT classmate who happens to have grown up in the same neighborhood as Will. Sean differs from his predecessors in that he pushes back at Will and is eventually able to get past Will’s hostile, sarcastic defense mechanisms. Will is particularly struck when Sean tells him how he gave up his ticket to see the Red Sox in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series (thus missing Carlton Fisk’s famous home run) in order to meet and spend time with a stranger in a bar, who would later become his wife. This encourages Will to try to establish a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), a young English woman he had earlier met at a bar near Harvard University. Read more

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