Sean Tarjoto
2/23/99
Film
Influential Film
Good Will Hunting is one of the films which I feel greatly influenced me. I felt the story was more about the personal secrets, unrealized potentials, and the well of hidden happiness that each character had yet to realize. Matt Damon's character had two qualities that allowed the entire plot to unfold, his an extraordinary thinking ability and a knack for protecting his own insecurities by deciphering everyone else's. Will Hunting had to deal with some serious emotional issues in order to understand the nature of his cynicism, and the reasons for his loneliness. While viewing the film, I began being thankful I didn't have the traumatic experience of domestic abuse, but I simultaneously realized I had an innate tendency to immediately search for faults in those that surrounded me, or entered my life.
During the first part of my Junior year I began realizing many of the friends I used to hang out with had either left Central or were simply not good friends. At that point, and perhaps even before, I'd been reluctant to associate myself with any group, any persona, for fear of being trapped in the wrong "box", of revealing to the unwitting brutality of a person's approval any delicate pieces of my life. For that reason, I attempted to identify with nothing and from that I achieved nothing, save for meaningless non-conformity.
During the first half of the year, at the time the movie was just released, I began noticing the ubiquitous appraisal from every person who had seen Good Will Hunting. From Central Students to Gene Siskel to Dennis Miller Live, there was a unanimous decision that this movie, and everything dealing with it (from the story of its production to the outcome of its plot, to its keeper title), was worth the seven bucks and two hours of your attention. But moreover, I took these responses in good favor. At that point, I realized I was suddenly aware of my interests into what other people thought, how they felt, and what it may have meant to my own interests.
Good Will Hunting was really one of the first movies I'd watched with more than the plot in mind. At this time, I began seriously, although unwittingly, interested in acting and photography. Thus, I was interested in the entirety of a film, and had actually let myself go on something. I indulged in the flawed realism of each character that I saw so bravely played. I took in the full defeated expressions of Robin William's unpretentious, homely, psychologist, and snared in pieces of lighting and tracking for my own interpretative value. I grew willingly eager to listen to the modern normalcy of Minnie Driver's up-and-coming college woman (who wasn't necessarily the woman behind the man, but rather, the woman driving the man). And I found Stellan Skarsgård's portrayal of a mathematician that had (at some time in his life) both Will Hunting's potential and Robin William's experience.
This is a film that changed my perception of people as no more different, much more similar. It is also a film that helped me understand many more things about myself, my interests, and my intentions for the future. Here, I realized that emotions seemed to be one of the few things that permeated the essence of the word human. Regardless of how psychologically repressed or wildly uninhibited they were. There is nothing else people need more than people; this is what I found out, what I confirmed, through this film.
(
geocities.com/tarjoto)