Good Will Hunting – A Closer Look At Life

6:20 PM | Labels: Good Will Hunting, Movie Reviews, Movies

This is a very inspiring movie about Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon, a 20-year old man who worked as a janitor in a school where he met the professor who first discovered his talent in Mathematics. Will is a Mathematics genius, a gifted person who also has photographic memory. He didn’t have formal education and an orphan since he was younger but he liked to read a lot and because he had a photographic memory, it was very easy for him to remember this he had read. He need not study in Harvard to be brilliant just like Skylar – the woman he fell in love with. He just need to read something once for him to be able to learn it. The professor in the school where he worked for as a janitor discovered his talent when he was able to solve a very difficult Match problem that took him and his colleagues more than two years to solve. He believed that Will can do more than that and he could be someone great in the future so he offered to help him. Will agreed with the him in the condition that he will be working with him in his office and Will should see a therapist twice or once a week.

Will didn’t want to meet the therapists and he just made fun out of all of them. He believed that there was nothing wrong with him; he was just living the life he used to live. But everything changed when he met Sean, played by actor Robin Williams. He was the professor’s colleague in college. Sean was also a professor, and a former counselor. His wife had cancer and he gave up counseling when she died. Sean also lived a sad life since his wife died and he was able to get back on track when his former colleague asked him to give Will sessions of therapy each week. The therapy made Will and Sean discover a lot of things about themselves. Sean was able to let Will know how brilliant and intelligent he was in his own field but he also let him be aware of how inexperienced he was still in handling his own experiences and emotions. Sean was able to know that Will’s delinquent acts, very few attachments, and lack of trust was all because of his negative experiences in the past. The people he gave his trust to all let him down and which made it hard for him to establish a certain degree of trust with anyone else again.

With their series of counseling sessions, Will becoming more open to Sean each time, the latter was able to make Will realize how crooked was the way he lived his life. That was the moment when Sean asked him the question “What do you want to do?” Will wasn’t able to answer it right in front of Sean’s face but when he contemplated on this question; he later realized that his life already needed a direction. He looked for a job and went back to visit Sean in his office to say thank you for everything he had for him. If it wasn’t for Sean, he could have wasted his precious gift and ruined his whole life.

The story was concluded with Will heading to California “to go and see about a girl”. This was the exact words that Sean told him when he refused to watch one of the biggest baseball game in history only to be with the woman he just meet – who later turned out to be his wife. Skylar was the girl Will met in a bar, dated for quite some time, and turned down when she asked him to go to California with her. She loved Will so much but he was just too scared to love her back because of the thought that he wasn’t the guy meant for her to have in his current situation. He later realized that she was really the one whom he wanted to be with for the rest of his life. Will’s life finally had the clear path and direction for him to follow and he owed it all to Sean.

A few words will never be able to contain the beauty and inspiration that one can experience from this movie. This one will surely break through and touch one’s heart. A movie for everyone to see. One highly recommended by professionals and an A-list among movies shown in every Psychology classes in prestigious universities. This movie is not all about building trust and attachments, it all about life and the whole of it.