Matt Damon, Hollywood's latest gift to Tiger Beat, has blue eyes, lots of white teeth and lips that are hard to come by without collagen injections. Adorable in that boy-toy-next-door kind of way, Damon has the pug face of a pugilist...or a Pekingese. His facial features are a little scrunched, as if they're still shifting into place. In Good Will Hunting, where he plays a South Boston punk who just happens to be a mathematical genius, Damon conveys deep thought by staring straight ahead, his eyes slightly crossed, his lips slightly parted. Like the rest of us, he thinks with his mouth open. The movie itself thinks with its mouth open. That may be why it has such an easy time connecting with us. Damon wrote the script with co-star Ben Affleck, and it doesn't take a very high IQ to sense the calculation in co-writing a movie where your character's blinding brilliance is allowed to shine all over the audience. Good Will Hunting is formulaic, derivative and curiously dumb when it tries to be smart. On the other hand, there's genuine emotion here, especially when Damon crosses swords with that old whiz kid, Robin Williams. Williams is a once-promising psychologist--yesterday's genius. He's also the only thing standing between today's genius and jail. Damon's Will Hunting has a chip on his shoulder. Raised in foster homes, where he was routinely abused, he now pushes people away--or punches them out--before they've had a chance to get to him. That includes Minnie Driver's Skylar, a Harvard student who swiftly falls in love with him. Only Will's homeboys, a collection of townies straight out of Breaking Away, understand him. What they don't understand are Advanced Fourier Systems. Will does. Then again, Will understands everything...and nothing. The best parts of the movie are when Williams and Damon are matching wits in a game of competitive psychiatry; instead of Ordinary People, Extraordinary People. Having temporarily set aside his comedy genius, Williams is surprisingly effective as a doctor who can't heal himself. And Damon manages to convince us he's both a janitor and the Mozart of modern math. If only the movie itself were more original, more daring. Like a teacher's pet, it crosses every t, dots every i and expects an A for effort.
While watching Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, I kept thinking about the way two boxers will grab hold of each other as a means of temporarily warding off the blows; at that moment, they almost appear to be in love. Directed by Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father) and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a man who's just spent 14 years in an English prison for participating in an IRA bombing, The Boxer has the audacity to imagine a world where the hostilities between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland could be contained within the frayed ropes of a boxing ring. A pipe dream? Perhaps, but when it's a choice between a pipe dream and a pipe bomb....
