On the heels of Robin Williams suicide, I thought I’d review one his few films I liked. In Gus Van Sant’s drama, written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Williams plays a community college professor and psychologist. With his MIT credentials, he could have been a big deal but was waylaid by love and is now stricken with grief at her passing.

When William is introduced to guide the damaged savant, Will Hunting (Damon), we know that when all is said and done, both characters will have taught each other something valuable about life.

A lot can go wrong here.

But Van Sant keeps it even. Williams is smartly subdued, with no hint of the manic persona that became more schtick and adrenaline than acting. He is patient, picks his spots and elevates much of the film’s schmaltz with real pathos. When he is riled, it feels authentic and raw.

As for the film itself, I’ve always been torn. The concept is smart. A working-class Boston kid is also a genius, sadly mopping floors at MIT, but he finds a way to shine and then falls in love and then, through therapy, grows out of his limiting, Southie world. Van Sant’s direction is inventive (the slo-motion rumble to Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” is particularly nifty, and there are many such cool touches); the exchanges between the Southie pals (Damon, Ben Affleck – again, proving he can be very good in small doses – Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser) are believable, very natural, and often hilarious; there is actual heat between Damon and his romantic interest, Minnie Driver; and Elliot Smith’s musical contributions are hauntingly memorable.

On the downside, while Damon is quite good as the lead, his character is kind of one big cheat. Plagued by his own demons, we are supposed to empathize with Will, but he is a selfish, smug prick throughout, just about every assist you can give a modern protagonist – he’s lonely, he was shuttled from foster home to foster home, he was beaten as a child, his enemies are grotesque caricatures that lack only the villain’s mwahahahahahaha, and yet …

Here, Will goes toe-to-toe a snooty Harvard type:

Obviously, the Hah-vahhhd pony-tail is the bad guy (on the strength of the pony tail alone), but much of the film is sneering at the uptight folks who admire his genius and do him no injustice.

It reminded me of Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome: “There’s Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and super-tolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, they were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.”

So, as the music swells, and Will escapes the clutches of Southie to chase love, I’m pretty sure he’s going to revert to being a smug prick soon enough. Only now, Minnie Driver will be there to socialize him.

Louis CK pretty much nails it:

The best sports movie ever made, a character-driven blend of sentimentality and tension that dramatizes the football culture on a small, poor Texas town. Every trope that is bandied about by lesser sports films is obliterated, yet, the film doesn’t reject the formula. There are gridiron heroes, strong women who stand behind them, racial undertones, father-son generational combat and an obligatory half time speech.

But compare the ridiculous grandiosity and easy message of most any sports film with the replication of the game in this picture and you’ll find there is no comparison. The women are actual characters, not noble support. The racial issues are genuine and near imperceptible, the blacks don’t exist to teach the whites to dance, and the whites don’t exist for the confession of absolution. The father son dynamic between Tim McGraw and Garrett Hedlund is incredibly moving and Billy Bob Thornton’s halftime speech is poetry.

This is a beautifully acted film, as much about a community as the players, and I’m moved every time I see it. Never more so than by Derek Luke’s work in this scene:

This is one of Spike Lee’s better films, an audacious picture of Americana (scored by Aaron Copland no less) that both mythologizes and indicts the sports culture while dramatizing the strained relationship between a convict father (Denzel Washington) and his son (Ray Allen), a prized high school basketball recruit. Washington is released from Attica with the promise of a lessened sentence if he can convince Allen to sign with the governor’s alma mater. He has one week to do it, and has to overcome several hurdles, the greatest of which is the fact that he is in jail for accidentally killing Allen’s mother in a domestic fight.

As in Summer of Sam, Lee’s appetite is enormous, and he typically tries to tackle too many issues in this sweeping story. He also includes a pointless subplot between Washington and a prostitute (Milla Jojovich) and indulges in his unfortunate penchant for speeches (Roger Guenveur Smith plays the local crime boss and delivers a PSA soliloquy on all the perils of fame that brings the picture to a screeching halt). But at the heart of the picture is Lee’s love for basketball, which he portrays as something truly majestic and unifying, skillfully interspersing old footage to punctuate the revered history of the game.

Washington is also commanding as the father who drove his son to succeed, and we see in him the love as well as the excesses of a parent who wants too much for his child. The scenes of a younger Washington pushing his little boy to be Jordan and their later one-on-one are beautiful and heartbreaking. Allen, an acting novice, does surprisingly well as the son, communicating the wonder of it all as the world opens itself for him.

This is a flawed picture, but Lee is working from the heart and shooting for the stars and it shows.