Things I Used to Love: Good Will Hunting

My VHS shelf. I'm not sure why I still have a shelf full of VHS tapes, as my only VCR is attached to a 13-inch TV that's currently taking up space in storage, but I guess I'm just not ready to part with them yet.

Continuing with this month's theme, today I'd like to talk about another movie that really shaped my romantic views: Good Will Hunting. On its surface, it doesn't really seem like a love story, but it gave me some ideas of what love could look like.

Good Will Hunting follows Will (Matt Damon at his all-time cutest, IMO), a 20-year-old who spent his youth bouncing around the foster-care system and now leads a rough-and-tumble life in South Boston while working as a janitor at MIT. He meets Skylar (Minnie Driver) while out and about one night, and the two begin dating. Other than that, he hangs out with his boys (Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser) and occasionally causes some trouble. After getting into a fight, part of his sentence includes meeting with a therapist (Robin Williams) to work on his emotional state. Oh, also, he's a genius with a photographic memory and he can solve crazy-hard math problems, which impresses an MIT professor.

Will and Skylar were kind of my ideal couple: their rapport seems so natural and effortless. They enjoy each other and make jokes, but it doesn't feel overly cutesy. They fight, but they seem like equals, not like rom-coms where the girl is a bitch so the guy gets mad, or the guy looks at another girl so the girl gets mad. And Skylar seems classy, but not stuffy. When Will says, "I was hoping to get good-night laid," she takes it in stride and doesn't huff off like he's offended her delicate sensibilities. This was the kind of girl I wanted to be: smart and classy, but able to hang with the boys and be crude right along with them. In some ways, I think I've accomplished this, but I don't think I'm as classy. Having a British accent like Minnie Driver would probably help.

Good Will Hunting came out in 1997, and I think my first viewing was a year or two after that. I loved it from the get-go, although I now realize how much of it went over my head as a naive teen (example: Skylar tells Will's friends a seriously filthy joke that I totally did not get until later in life). This was also the first time I saw Robin Williams in a serious role, which was quite a switch from Jack and Hook, but I think he knocked it out of the park. The film even won a few Oscars –  Best Supporting Actor for Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Damon and Affleck (at the ripe old ages of 27 and 25!) and was nominated for several more.

Without going into detail, I think the film ties everything up nicely without being too cheesy or over-the-top dramatic. It's definitely worth a watch, even if you're not into the rom-com aspect of it. It's a little hard to find in terms of streaming content, but you can buy the DVD on Amazon for $5. And since it's something you'll watch over and over, that's a pretty sound investment.