Review of Finding Forrester

Introduction

With an appropriately digital exactitude, this film displays precisely what happens when you meld ‘Good Will Hunting’ and ‘Wonder Boys’ and place it in a contemporary urban setting. Here, our genius is teenage writing God Jamal (newcomer Rob Brown), whose surroundings and contemporaries stereotype him as a talented but intellectually inert basketball player. His true gifts are spotted during school tests and he is offered a place at a prestigious prep school, where he soon ‘bonds’ with rich white, well-fed co-ed Anna Paquin and clashes with F. Murray Abraham’s sneering, limp and hilariously evil villain, who is like a cross between a snooty Principal Skinner and Darth Vader (“impressive… most impressive.”)

Anyway, when Jamal’s friends (who have cleaned up their language for a family audience) dare the genius to break into the home of a reclusive bird-watcher, William Forrester (Sean Connery) the genius strikes up a rapport with the cantankerous whinge and finds out that Forrester is in fact another genius writer who had one book published and subsequently deemed a classic and has been languishing in writer’s block ever since (sound familiar?)

Video

The strong, naturalistic lighting style and earthy ‘Scope camera work are well presented in this superior transfer. Director Gus Van Sant manages to retain a good sense of quirky visual reality amongst all the movie’s derivative schmaltz.

Audio

There’s little use made of the rear channels in this 5.1 track, but I doubt you’ll notice, given the dialogue driven nature of this film. Still, atmospheric enough.

Features

A mundane HBO ‘Making Of’, a ‘Found: Rob Brown’ featurette describing what we can only assume, judging by all the gushing in the interviews, was a moment of divine transcendence when Brown was cast in the lead role… before you grab the bucket, check out the deleted choir footage, which lends a surprising amount of class and genuine artistry in a movie desperately lacking in any. Then watch the theatrical trailers for the likes of ‘Forrester’, ‘Fly Away Home’ and ‘First Knight’ and reach for the bucket again.

Conclusion

‘Finding Forrester’ has the same fundamental problem as all middle-of-the-road mainstream movies about geniuses, and then amplifies it: how can a mediocre Hollywood hack-writer get inside the words and experiences of not one but two genius scribes? Indeed, during the film’s elaborate speech-driven ending (nabbed from, of all things, ‘Scent of a Woman’) the film dissolves out of Connery’s speech into a sweeping orchestral score… talk about a cop-out anti-climax. The film’s attempt to get a gritty and tangible grasp on the idea and reality of the genius in modern life (ala ‘Good Will Hunting’) is fudged by the unimaginative approach of the piece. Van Sant tries to spice up the picture with some text-book indie-flair (check out that weird intro) and the performances by Brown and Connery are decent. Although it is nice to see a positive portrayal of an urban, working class black community, the whole thing is wet, academic, square and passionless, with no new insights into Jamal and Forrester’s central thematic dilemmas of peer pressure, social conformity, self-awareness and reputation as protection from the outside world.

As for Van Sant, it seems that the once interesting auteur has gone the Tim Burton route to fully embracing Hollywood hackery, with a few idiosyncratic flourishes thrown in. We can only pray he’s finally gotten the touchy-feely student-mentor melodrama purged from his system and can start making interesting movies again, like ‘To Die For’, ‘My Own Private Idaho’ and ‘Drugstore Cowboy’, because this just doesn’t cut it: As a rites-of-passage story, it is trite, predictable and underdeveloped. For a movie about the pain and passion of the writer, there’s simply too many stronger competitors out there to make this a contender. Try ‘Wonder Boys’ instead.