Director: Gus Van Sant
Cast: Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Rob Brown, Anna Paquin
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Hell, I once gave a presentation to a writer’s group where I showed the famous “You’re the Man Now, Dog” scene as a segue to the virtues of using a typewriter.
Which really should have been the takeaway from that scene, not the decade-plus of memes we got as a result.
Did I Like It: It would be easy to dismiss the film for the parts that some might call derivative. The film is built on a foundation of the white savior complex, which one can only hope will age even more poorly as the years progress. It has enough of Van Sant’s early triumph with Good Will Hunting (1997) looming over it to ever get to be its own movie. And there’s more than a little bit of Scent of a Woman (1992) to make the whole thing feel familiar to the point of being a pat.
The thing is, I can never truly dismiss the film any time I see it. For one thing, it gets the feeling of writing correct*. Punching the keys; sometimes its the rhythm. Reading for dinner and dessert. Write with your heart; re-write with your head.
And then there’s the case of Sean Connery. His storied film career went out with whimper in films like The Avengers (1998) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), and we forget that he had one great film performance left to him. His Forrester takes the broad brush strokes of J.D. Salinger and made him a triumph of both sadness and triumph. There are plenty of leading men built on an image of machismo who couldn’t reach for that level of vulnerability, much less in his second-to-last role.
*For other entries in this hallowed pantheon, see Shakespeare in Love (1998), Wonder Boys (2000) (of which I am shocked to learn that, as of this writing, I have not written a review), and Adaptation (2002)… I’m sure I’m missing others which might have been made prior to the Clinton administration, but they are escaping me… Let’s just go with the introduction scene of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and call it good.