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. 

Burnt (2015): First Impressions

SPOILERS AHEAD!

This is not yet a polished review of the film. It's more like a rough first draft of impressions. 

 I am the complete opposite of a foodie. I have been known to eat food lacking salt and not notice. Therefore the only draw for me in this move was the potential psychological drama and redemption story.

 I started watching the movie hoping I was going to get a story about the journey on the path of Mastery (see Robert Greene, George Leonard etc). Given this expectation, I was somewhat disappointed. I will try to list out the reasons below.

1. In Rocky, we sympathise and empathise with Rocky Balboa since he is an underdog. Sure, he has some basic level of boxing skill, but he's quite far from any level of Mastery, and what's more, he's not even acquired the mindset that will draw him to take the first step on the goalless path of Mastery. He's not even an apprentice properly speaking because his heart is in it. He doubts his vocation, and Mickey rejects him as  a student initially. He is directionless and his life has stagnated - not plateaued, stagnated even before he has started, and it does not look like he will get anywhere in life unless something changes. The story does not start with a fall but rather a failure to rise. The viewer who has experienced some hard knocks in life, or who has been dealt a bad hand, cannot help identifying with Rocky Balboa, the underdog.

 Adam Jones, on the other hand, is not by any stretch an underdog when the movie begins. He's not even a mid-level dog. He's already a top dog who's aiming at becoming one of the supreme dogs. He is already a two star Michelin chef who's messed up his career. That is, he has already achieved a level of success that the average viewer is likely very far away from in his chosen profession or hobby. He's clearly past the stage of  the Apprentice and even that of the Journeyman. He has actually achieved a level of Mastery already, all of which has happened off screen before this movie even started. No matter what mistakes he might have done, his hard-earned cooking skills are not going to evaporate. He can start picking up the pieces of his life and put them together pretty fast anytime he decides to, which is exactly what happens. Right off the bat, this makes him difficult to identify with, unless you are already an overachiever. The movie starts with Bradley Cooper's voiceover (already not a good sign; what happened to show, don't tell?) explaining his fall from grace and his self-imposed penance (which seems arbitrary; perhaps there is something appropriate about shelling oysters that foodies or chefs can understand easily, but it escapes me). But once again, an opportunity to create identification is missed because when we first meet him, he is on the last day of his penance. There's really not much of a "Gonna Fly Now" montage. But as soon as we see his penance for the first time, it's over! And he is out on a quest to redeem his honour. But the arrogant way in which he acts and talks from this point does not seem to indicate his penance has taught him any humility. Once again, we are told, not shown (though in a conversation this time, not a voiceover, so that's a little better) that he is now abstaining from his addictions and from women. 

The arrogant ease with which he assembles a team and gets to become the driving force of his friends restaurant reminded me of Napoleon Hill in Outwitting the Devil, talking about how one of his ventures failed and he was at rock bottom - only to proceed to tell the reader in the next few lines how he got in touch with some friends and put together a new business venture. Anyone who has that level of skills and prestige/social-proof at his disposal does not have real problems, just minor annoyances, and do we really want to watch a hero's journey that is all about side-stepping minor annoyances.  We don't see the hero fall apart in real time. We don't see doors that slam shut in his face and refuse to open for him. We don't see him banging at those doors in futility. This is no Pursuit of Happyness.

In the 7 Habits series, both Stephen Covey and Sean Covey say that the inner battle has to be won before the external battle. By the time we meet him, Adam Jones has already won his inner battles. He just has to make this victory present in the exterior world. The most exciting and dramatic parts of this story are already over.

2. He can't seem to walk a few feet without tripping over some old friend or enemy. The plot seems contrived at this point.

3. The whole movie is about his going for the third star. I'm guessing viewers who are two star chefs will be able to identify with him, but I somehow don't. Perhaps if they had shown how he struggled with his addictions, who helped him quit and stay sober.

4. He refuses to rekindle his relationship with his old flame because she is better off without him, but does not reject getting drawn into the initiation of a relationship with Helene. True, she initiates the coming closer, not him, but I was expecting to tell Helene that she's better off without him too. Everyone is better off not getting close to him until he's exorcised his demons successfully.

 

5. The ending is a sort of Deus Ex Machina, twice. First, though his pride doesn't allow him to accept money from his friend, he is okay with his ex paying off those whom he owes money. Second, it's purely providential that those customers were not inspectors but mere software salesmen. The ending where he simply continues doing his duty instead of getting flustered and making special preparations was a nice touch. So was his not getting angry at his old friend/enemy for taking revenge on him. If only the whole of the movie had this same detachment from the fruits approach.