First Impressions: Good Will Hunting

 This is a well known film that keeps getting mentioned among cinema lovers, which I hadn't watched till now. So I decided to give it a watch. 

Sadly, I couldn't bring myself to love it. I mean, it's great that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck came up with a screenplay that initially started out as a college project and had the work ethic to push it through the execution stage and shipped the finished product. But the film as a work of art sadly falls short of its potential.

First, it does not touch upon the concept of mastery, the process of starting out as a fool, being an apprentice, reaching competence, then mastery and finally being able to innovate and push the boundaries of knowledge. The main character claims that he can do advanced math easily because of pure natural talent. He can do it because he just can. No painstaking practice was involved, at least not the way he tells it. The only time we see him practice is when he scrawls an equation on his bathroom cabinet mirror. Given the fact that the film doesn't choose to show him churning away at work, depth of knowledge in one field is difficult to stomach, but the story requires him to somehow be a master of multiple fields!

This story is sure to appeal to those of the Fixed Mindset and those who firmly believe in the existence of natural talent (distinction: I can concede the existence of natural inclination, but that is very far from the claim natural talent - that certain people can perform certain rational activities better because they just have superior ability, not even in their biology as a result of good genetics, but more deeply, because of having the ability in their deepest essence.) 

One of the characters talks of Ramanujan. His life was a testament to the grind, to obsession, to the one thing, if anything.

The presence of Robin Williams is basically the large part holding the film down and preventing it from being carried away by its flock of cliches. But even Robin Williams cannot make a good film out of what is not so. Anyway, the character played by Robin Williams could easily be thought of as an older version of Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society.

Also, Robin Williams keeps insisting to Matt Damon's character that experience is the only valid epistemological means. Surely a student of the mind as a psychiatrist should be would understand that the fact that we have mirror neurons is one of the amazing things about us. We can deal in abstractions. We don't have to experience everything, and it isn't even practically possible. Life being short, there will always be a great many important things in everybody's life that one is not able to learn through direct experience. If experience were the only way to true knowledge, we are all doomed.

Also, Matt Damon being a handsome attractive young man in his prime, really cannot pull off the misunderstood genius. (Russel Crowe could pull this off in "A Beautiful Mind.") So here he is a genius who is not a social misfit. Thus since they had to give him a backstory to explain his self-sabotage, they settled on a history of abuse in childhood. It's ironic, because after all the cliches about geniuses this film indulges in, they missed the one cliche that is actually true most of the time - geniuses are misunderstood and are misfits in society quite often. 

Also, Ben Affleck's character seems to want the best for his friend. His great fantasy is to find that his friend has one day left behind his dead end life in this dreary neighbourhood and has moved on - geographically as well as spiritually, to a better life. Quite noble of him, but the hidden assumption is that he himself will never amount to anything much and is condemned to a life of mediocrity or worse. But why? Is he mentally or physically crippled? It doesn't look like it. Then why this fatality? Once again evidence of the Fixed Mindset. Even the Fields' Medal winning professor is resigned to the fact that he will never make any contributions to mathematics as great as his new protege's. He has no faith in the process of mastery!

 

This is one movie which could use a healthy dose of the Growth Mindset.