Trailer Park: Good Will Hunting
Movie
Good Will Hunting, released December 5 1997
Trailer Synopsis
Boston-based n’er-do-well Will Hunting (Matt Damon) gets out of going to jail by doing math and meeting with a shrink named Sean (Robin Williams). Can Will live up to his potential that his friend Ben Affleck doesn’t have access to? Can he woo the girl (Minnie Driver)? Will we get absolutely inundated with all those Southie accents? All signs point to yes!
Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
To a point. Will does in fact have a rap sheet and he is some sort of vaguely-defined mathematical genius, and he does spend a lot of the movie sparring with Williams Dr. Sean Maguire. But Good Will Hunting is a strange movie that has almost no plot in the beginning (much like a lot of mid-’90s indie flicks that are essentially about dudes talking) and then stumbles into way too much plot by the end (the whole scenario wherein Stellan Skarsgard’s Professor Gerald Lambeau wants to set Will up with some sort of nefarious government job is confusing and laughable). Still, the trailer does do a fine job of establishing the then-ascendent Damon as the focal point of the movie, one that needs to coast on his charms to survive.
Does It Make You Want to See the Movie?
It does not. While Good Will Hunting does have some uplifting moments and an extremely satisfying heartstring-tugger of a finale, this trailer makes it feel like a generically sentimental feel-good exercise about a kid coming to terms with…something. There’s not a whole lot of stakes introduced, and the idea that Will has finally “met his match” in Sean is weird because we just met Will thirty seconds ago. Good Will Hunting is a low-stakes affair with some crackling dialogue, and the trailer leaves out most of the screenplay’s personality and dials-up the faux-inspirational pap. I really liked Good Will Hunting when I saw it in ‘98, but my first exposure to it was through the glowing reviews it received upon its release and during the walk-up to its Oscar victory for Williams. I cannot imagine I would have watched this trailer in ‘97 and thought it was a can’t miss. This might as well be the trailer for Mr. Holland’s Opus.
What’s Weird About It?
The aforementioned lack of good dialogue is a strange choice. The script, an Oscar-winner penned by Damon and Affleck, has a lot of really good conversational set-pieces. Most of them are between the writers themselves, but everything between Damon and Driver sings as well. It’s so weird to me that there isn’t anything in the trailer from this movie’s signature sequence, wherein Will defends Affleck’s Chuckie from a pretentious Harvard prep douche that leads directly to the “Do you like apples?” bit. That’s the best stuff in the movie! I’m not suggesting you give away that entire sequence in the trailer, but there’s not a single hint of that type of lively dialogue here.
The same goes for the Damon and Driver stuff. There’s a scene in that same sequence where Driver’s Skylar asks Will if he wants to get coffee some time, and he responds with a riff about eating a bunch of caramels (because it’s as arbitrary as drinking coffee). That should have been in the trailer too, if only to suggest that the movie has a pretty robust sense of humor. As it stands, this makes Good Will Hunting look pretty dire, and while there is plenty of heartbreak and melancholy baked into the story, it’s also got a lot of robust charm that is not even suggested by the trailer.
There’s also some great exchanges between Will and Sean! This was, after all, an Oscar-winning performance for Williams, largely because he was able to juxtapose his showiness with a more reserved quality, but this trailer makes those therapy scenes—which take up a huge chunk of the movie—seem positively somnambulant. The more I think about it, this trailer actually makes me like Good Will Hunting less, and it’s a movie I like!
Does It Spoil the Movie?
Nope. It doesn’t suggest the plot machinations of the second half nor does it really explain why Will is so special. Not that Good Will Hunting is the type of movie that can really be spoiled. I mean, what would a spoiler have been back in ‘97? That he gets the girl? That he has a breakthrough with Sean? That there’s an Oscar-nominated Elliott Smith song on the soundtrack? We’re not talking about Star Wars here.
Final Analysis
Good Will Hunting is a movie that mostly holds up nearly a quarter-century after its release. It’s a fascinating little time capsule for Damon and Affleck, both of whom became two of their generation’s biggest stars (and who are back together both acting and writing in this fall’s The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott). It’s got one of Williams’ best all-around performances (the scene where he describes Carlton’s Fisk’s walk-off home run in the 1975 World Series is some bravura stuff) and also boasts a great turn from Driver, who probably should have won Best Supporting Actress that year (she was nominated but lost to Kim Basinger for L.A. Confidential, which is a fine enough performance but also like the sixth most memorable turn in that movie). And yet I hate this trailer because it twists the flick into something it almost is but definitely isn’t, and that’s why it gets this series’ lowest score so far. 2/10