"Finding Forrester"

A young prodigy teams up with a Salingeresque recluse in a "Good Will Hunting" retread from Gus Van Sant.

By Laura Miller

Dec 20, 2000 | It's probably pointless to ask why Gus Van Sant -- who fought for years to get to direct a shot-by-shot re-creation of "Psycho" -- would borrow so heavily from his own "Good Will Hunting" in his new film; originality isn't his bag. Perhaps Van Sant sees "Finding Forrester" as a potentially lucrative return to the successful formula of "Good Will Hunting," or maybe, to take a less cynical view, he's got a thing for stories about fatherless boys yearning to be mentored by older men. Even the quixotic "Psycho" project fits that psychological profile in a way -- though God help the child who picks Alfred Hitchcock to be his Good Daddy.

"Good Will Hunting" was a handsome, well-textured film that mostly steered clear of shameless heartstring-wringing; "Finding Forrester," by contrast, is a farrago, with a few morsels of deft social observation and likable performances floating around in a conventional stew of overblown, bogus emotion and rigged catharsis.

It's the story of a secretive genius, Jamal Wallace (well-played by newcomer Rob Brown), an African-American 16-year-old who conceals a love for books and an impressive self-acquired education in order to fit in with the rest of the basketball-mad kids in his Bronx neighborhood.

Jamal is also a wizard at the hoops. ("Basketball is how he gets his acceptance," a teacher explains for the benefit of any halfwits in the audience.) When he tips his academic hand by scoring big on a state-administered aptitude test, an elite prep school comes calling with the offer of a scholarship.

Around the same time, Jamal's journals fall into the hands of a neighborhood recluse (Sean Connery). The old man tosses the books out his window, but only after he's marked them up with a red pencil. Jamal gets the idea that here, at last, is the teacher he craves. A prickly friendship ensues.

Meanwhile, back at the prep school, there's a love interest in the form of Claire (Anna Paquin), a wry Upper East Side princess. We're also given an oreo on the basketball team, who rebuffs Jamal's brotherly overtures ("You think we're the same, but we're not," the kid says, just in case those halfwits need another expository boost), and F. Murray Abraham, chewing up the mahogany-paneled scenery as the supercilious Professor Crawford, a tyrant who believes that Jamal can't possible have written the papers he hands in.

The school's basketball team finally starts winning, and Jamal discovers that his crusty new pal is none other than William Forrester, a Salingeresque writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first and only book ("the great 20th century novel," Professor Crawford calls it) 30 years ago and hasn't been heard from since.

Unless you're bothered by minor questions like why a prep-school teacher is called "professor," "Finding Forrester" remains, up to this point, palatable and occasionally interesting. Jamal's dilemma -- how to reap the fruits of his tentative entree into privilege without pulling away from his beloved friends, family and neighborhood -- is both painful and believable, and newcomer Brown plays him as winningly low-key. Van Sant has a sensitive eye, and in a couple of understated scenes (in a subway car, in a classroom), he conveys something of what it feels like to be the only black person in a crowd of whites. The supporting players, particularly Paquin and rap star Busta Rhymes as Jamal's jokester brother, are mostly charming.

Alas, a delicate unfolding of the experience of being stuck between two cultures, and nuanced characters who act and behave like real human beings, are not on the menu for "Finding Forrester." The Hollywood feel-good imperative demands that Van Sant and screenwriter Mike Rich tart up the undramatic life of the writing student with gobs of oleaginous sentimentality and at least one race against time culminating in a grand, life- and love-affirming speech. In the process, they hopelessly mangle Jamal's story. Forrester is given a Tragic Secret -- revealed on the pitcher's mound at Yankee Stadium, no less -- as explanation for his unsociability, and a profoundly confused series of improbabilities conspire to force the elder writer out of his shell to publicly denounce the snooty Crawford and save his young friend from expulsion.

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