Finding Forrester

Directed by Gus van Sant

With Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, Busta Rhymes, Anna Paquin and others

Christina says:

Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) is a highly gifted teenage boy who likes to read Kierkegaard whenever he doesn’t play basketball with his friends. Like most teenagers he doesn’t want to stick out in any way, therefore his teachers are the last to find out about his talents. But one day his test results give him away and he is offered a place in an expensive private school in Manhattan. Jamal hesitates to accept it because he realizes that the school wants to recruit a player for the basketball team and isn’t really interested in his possible academic achievements. But then he decides to accept the opportunity for a better education than his public school has to offer. In his new school Jamal soon attracts the hatred of his teacher Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham) who doesn’t appreciate students who stand up to him and are smart and well read enough to do so.

Jamal’s friends dare him to break into the apartment of author William Forrester, a legendary recluse who lives in their neighborhood. Forrester recognizes the boy’s talent and takes him under his wing, but Jamal has to swear not to breath a word about Forrester to any living soul. Forrester severed his ties with the world outside his apartment after winning the Pulitzer for his novel ‘Avalon Landing’, the last of his works to be published.

Gus van Sant seems to have enjoyed doing the remake of Hitchcock’s classic PSYCHO so much that he remade another movie: his own work GOOD WILL HUNTING. Like Will Jamal is a boy who doesn’t fit in with his environment because he has a special talent and gets the chance to develop it. Will’s special talent was supposed to bring math professor Stellan Starsgard eternal fame, Jamal’s school wants him on their basketball team. Just like Will Jamal becomes estranged from his friends and their little macho adventures. He, too, finds a girlfriend from a different world, but since they are younger than their predecessors everything remains innocent. Anna Paquin was challenged a lot more at the tender age of eleven when she did Jane Campion’s THE PIANO. Troubled psychiatrist Robin Williams provides guidance in GOOD WILL HUNTING, a part that is taken by troubled writer Sean Connery in FINDING FORRESTER, but here it’s the sensitive boy who helps the reclusive author get back on his feet. Both Brown and Connery deliver a good performance. Jamal is no troublemaker who stands in his own way. Perhaps a black boy can only earn his way out of the ghetto if he’s a ‘good boy’ who never does anything worse than the relatively harmless break-in into an eccentric neighbor’s apartment. And perhaps a white boy from the ghetto needs to be an abused orphan because that would be the only excuse for his messed-up life.

F. Murray Abraham plays the part of the baddie who wants to nip Jamal’s career in the butt and he plays it with devotion.

FINDING FORRESTER is a feel-good-movie that sticks to the safe but beaten tracks of the American Dream. It’s well made, though, and well acted and therefore worth watching.

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Christina Gross

Last changes: 01/04/03