Better Will Not Hunting

I first saw Good Will Hunting in 1998 at Nandan, when I was a postgrad student in Calcutta. My first impression was; why this film could not get best film award at the Oscars instead of Titanic. In my opinion, Titanic was the biggest overhyped piece of melodrama (even bigger than Slumdog Millionaire) that have swept major Oscar awards. This opinion did't change till date, and will not change in the future. But my opinion about GWH changed radically after second and third viewings. Needless to say, I didn't have much idea about American higher education system back in 1998.

I had a more matured mindset during the second viewing of GWH in 2005. My primary objection to the film was the absurd idea of Will Hunting being a janitor in MIT. If he was a "Einstein" as the film depicted, there's no way he couldn't get formal higher education in this country. How could Damon and Affleck get Oscar for such an absurd screenplay?

After moving to Boston, I had a third viewing of the film. I pointed out two major discrepancies. First, the animosity of Irish-American Will towards the English aristocrat MIT academia. Being in MIT for several years now, I must say that there's hardly any class difference here. For several decades, MIT attracts researchers from several backgrounds irrespective of race, color, creed, sex, religion, nationality. The population in MIT, faculy student alike, is so heterogeneous that it's highly impossible for a class difference to exist. This gross generalization by Hollywood reflects their ignorance about the higher learning system in their own country.

My second objection was the depiction of an Indian with reference to Ramanujan. Any Indian will be shocked by the mildly racist comment, "Dots, not feathers", made by Prof. Lambeau (played by Skarsgard) to differentiate between native Indians and Asian-Indians. With so many Indian professors around (the Dean of Engineering being an Indian), how could a professor in MIT make such a comment to describe an Indian? The learned men in MIT at least know where India is and what Indians are. This is stereotyped Hollywood at its best, which frequently fails to recognize other cultures than American and doesn't want to understand what "rest of the world" means.