While I don't intend to spoil the film for any of this blog's viewers, I will give a brief (mostly) exposition to help you all contextualize some of the analysis I do of this transformative movie. Will Hunt, a 20 year old youth who has spent his entire life in and out of foster care on the poor south side of Boston, commutes to M.I.T. every morning to wash floors until long after students and professors exit the lecture halls. One such professor is Gerry Lambaugh, a Fields Medal winner, who is considered a mathematical genius. He challenges his Advanced Theories class to proving one of the most complex theorems in the field, which Lambaugh and his colleagues took years to devise. While washing floors at night, careful that nobody has eyes on him, Will takes chalk to the board outside the lecture hall on which the proof is to be done. He completes it within minutes on a break from serpentines with his mop. And correctly. When a student of Lambaugh's notifies him the next day that the theorem has been proved, Lambaugh is stunned and eager to find the mysterious mathematician, who he believes is in his class.
A short while later in the movie, Lambaugh puts up another, far more challenging theorem to be procved. Him and his assistant see Will writing on the board and think he is vandalizing the Institute's property, but soon discover that Will is an enormously talented individual. It was good that they did because this winds up being Will's ticket out of jail after he gets into a bloody brawl with a rival posse of him and his buddies. He is only let out of jail on a conditional basis, however. In addition to doing math with Professor Lambaugh, who, it becomes apparent, is more interested in Will's gifts than actually helping him out of his current and rather dire living situation, Will also has to do therapy. As a hard-headed, hard-bodied, self-proclaimed womanizing badass, Will is very reluctant to the idea of this, as one might imagine. After getting underneath the skin and into the minds of multiple shrinks, Lambaugh reaches out to his college roommate, Sean (played by Robin Williams) – a professor at a community college slightly more than slightly less prestigious than M.I.T. – in a last-ditch effort to keep will from going back to prison and thus help himself make a great deal of money. In their first meeting, it seems as if Will is going to break Sean like every other therapist he'd seen prior, insulting Sean, his dead wife, and all of his life's accomplishments. By some miracle, Sean agrees to see Will for another session, and the rest of the movie follows the importance of the presence of their two opposite personalities in each other's lives.
Judging by the fact that it's unlikely my brief summary did any of the movie justice, you might get the sense that this is the cookie-cutter wise-presence-in-a-troubled-young-boy's-life kind of film. It is that...minus the cookie-cutter portion. It is too often that the oh-so-influential wise man in these kinds of movies is actually too wise, and his ability to learn from his student, for lack of a better term, detracts from the use of the archetypal character.
To help Will understand that the finest thing in life is love and that the hate and uncertainties about the world Will harbors are actually detrimental, Sean opens up about his own past professional and personal life. As the two grow closer and Will asks questions about Sean's personal life in particular, the therapy becomes mutual, helping Sean process years of agonizing baggage. I was genuinely surprised by this kind of depiction of therapy in mainstream culture being such a positive one (especially for this representation approaching 20 years of age). Usually therapeutic experiences are belittled, but what this got right was the give-and-take of secrets between patient and doctor that makes for most effective therapy.
It was fascinating to look at secrets as offensive and defensive mechanisms. It was certainly never going to be a deeply wounded Will that was going to be the first to volunteer a part of himself the world doesn't already see. Therefore, it had to be Sean that put a part of himself on the table. That being said, he uses his own secrets to bridge the disconnect that exists with Will at the beginning of their meetings. On the other hand, Will's strongest defense mechanism is his lack of willingness to open up. This goes to a show that we all use secrets, which fall under the larger umbrella of story, to our advantage and to get what we want, whether we realize it or not.
Among the most telling scenes of the movie is in one of their last sessions when Sean cautiously steps closer to Will, repeatedly whispering the phrase: "it is not your fault". This winds up in an embrace between the two men that I as a viewer felt, and the shoulder-shaking sobs that come from Will as his tough-guy facade finally dissipates and we understand Will on a level we never would have imagined we would, even in moments just prior to this scene. Here it is on your left.
Even though we use secrets to get what we want, Will never intended to become this close to anybody, nevertheless some shrink whose life he tears to shreds in their first meeting. But the difference between somebody like Sean and another like Gerry is that the genuine concern Sean has for Will's well-being instead of the shallow interest in his intellectual gifts that Gerry maintains throughout the movie create the unintended consequence of Will finding himself attached to Sean. This testifies not only to the unintended results that often come from keeping/sharing secrets, but it also goes to show that the ways in which one person handles another's secrets can either make or break a relationship. In Sean and Will's case, it certainly made it.
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