At the dramatic climax of Gus van Sant's 1997 film Good Will Hunting, before Matt Damon declares to Minnie Driver that he doesn't love her, he asks her a rhetorical question: "Do I have a mark on my back that says ' Save me!'
means?” For cinema audiences, the matter is clear: every muscle under the skin of the back, which has been the object of determined attention in several love scenes, is a signal that triggers the protective instinct.
On all sides like a Saint Sebastian by Rubens, Damon presents his body pumped full of unused energy, only that his redemption from the agony witnessed with so much physical presence should still be possible on earth.
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
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There isn't a spot that doesn't see us, and Damon's swelling lower lip, shadowed eyes, snub nose and haircut that's a bit too sleek for the stubborn pose say: We have to change his life, we have to meet Minnie Driver, the sly rich Englishwoman , and join forces with Robin Williams, the delicate, sad doctor of souls, to rescue the gifted young man from the trap of false pride.
The film is a modern fairy tale, and as we watch it we are supposed to believe that whatever structural conditions might prevent an orphan boy raised among Irish hired hands in Boston from following his destiny as a mathematical genius and the fastest history reader in the history of the world, are not to be found in the social conditions, but in the inner life of the hero, which we imagine to be constructed in as complicated a manner as is appropriate to the beauty of the outer figure.
Genius is more than inventiveness
Will Hunting with the suggestive name of the fairy tale character, hunted and hunter at the same time, should get his will not to be saved and still not go to hell.
This looks like an advanced Hollywood math problem on paper.
However, the paradoxical task cannot be solved at the blackboard through plot ingenuity alone.
Gus van Sant was born on July 24, 1952 in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a traveling salesman and manager. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and initially toyed with the idea of becoming a painter.
Several of his films exploring spaces of outsider life are set in Portland, Oregon, where he attended part-time school.
As a pioneer of queer cinema, he established himself in 1991 with "My Own Private Idaho", the transfer of Shakespeare's Falstaff tragedy of the rejected foster father to the hustler milieu.
The 1995 black comedy To Die For, about a weather presenter who sacrifices everything in her imaginary television career because she believes in the power of images, stunned with its flawless design, including leading actress Nicole Kidman's almost natural artificiality that transcends the satirical .
The alternation of success and failure in van Sant's career testifies to his willingness to experiment.
Good Will Hunting was nominated for nine Oscars;
Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor, and fellow cast members Matt Damon and Ben Affleck also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Gus van Sant's last feature film to date was the 2018 film adaptation of John Callahan's memoir, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot.
Robin Williams, who took his own life in 2014, originally wanted to play the role of the Portland cartoonist.
The spectator becomes a scout
In the longest shot in Gus van Sant's 2003 film Elephant, Nathan, one of the students played by non-professionals and introduced with tablets of their first names, wears a sign on his back meaning "Save me!"
Literally it says the opposite: the red hooded jacket that Nathan puts on after the impromptu football practice session on the lawn in front of the school identifies him as a "lifeguard," a lifesaver waiting.
But moviegoers know the film is about a school massacre and will see the white cross above the caption as a marker of a walking target.
The spectator turns into a double and scout for the perpetrators by following the boy's heels, while for endless minutes the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata melancholy drives forward.
Nathan walks straight through the school building, and you get the impression that he really is the type of student who catches the eye of his classmates.
Awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this film is the opposite of a fairy tale, in which all the action flows from the abilities of a child prodigy and the virtuosity of a star attests to the harmony of the world.
One can borrow the generic name from the sonata: 'Elephant' is a fantasy, as it were, a single-minded musing that touches on many possible triggers of doom, nodes of path dependencies without committing to causes.
The tracking shot slides back into casual stories that have already been told from a different perspective, about how school goes the same way over and over again every school day.
Without stopping time, the film recreates the openness of life and the ambiguity of the gaze.
This potential of the seemingly empty
time spent in society, without you noticing it at first, also the atmosphere in "Good Will Hunting".
Matt Damon's friends are his saviors.
Gus van Sant turns seventy this Sunday.