Earn This

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

Finding Forrester is above all a shameless attempt to cash in on phony Hollywood sentimentality.  A distant cousin and knock-off of the infinitely superior Good Will Hunting, it runs on a weak script that provides little more than contrived situations and uninspiring characters.  Gus Van Sant, director of Hunting, can’t come close to saving it.

Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), growing up in New York, is both a basketball star and talented writer.  He tries to keep his intellect hidden, confining his thoughts to notebooks.  William Forrester (Sean Connery) wrote one great novel and then became a reclusive hermit.  He spends part of his endless free time spying on the boys playing basketball near his apartment.  One day, Jamal takes a dare and sneaks into Forrester’s apartment, accidentally leaving behind his backpack in his haste to escape.  Before long, the two become friends, with Forrester helping Jamal with his writing.

This template has been done before, and Forrester adds nothing to the genre.  The Boo Radley persona of Connery’s character feels contrived to me, especially since we never really learn anything about him.  His relationship with Jamal is, naturally, the film’s center, but neither of the characters ever achieves a depth beyond that which you could have learned from a biographical sketch.  The film strives to equalize the two, rather than making Jamal dominate, but they’re both bland.  We’re supposed to believe that Forrester accepts his first friend in decades because he likes his writing, but that doesn’t come through—to me, he just seems bored.

Jamal, on the basis of his strong test scores, transfers to a white-bred prep school in Manhattan, where he feuds on the basketball court with an obnoxious student, flirts with a more appealing one, Claire, (Anna Paquin) and faces derision and slander from a teacher, Robert Crawford (F. Murray Abraham).  Not one of these storylines comes to a satisfying conclusion or enhances Jamal’s character in any way.  The punishment for Jamal’s sparring on the basketball court comes in the form of a free-throw shooting contest that just feels fake.  His relationship with Claire is straight out of screenwriting school and goes nowhere.  And giving Jamal an artificial villain, while drawing the battle lines in such black-and-white strokes, further erodes the film’s credibility.

Many critics compared the ending, where Forrester emerges from his seclusion to defend Jamal, to that of Scent of a Woman; I never made the connection in my mind, but regardless of whether you see a similarity, Pacino’s flick handled the situation much more smoothly.  Sure, the principal in Scent was a bit of a clown, but at least you could have made the argument that Chris O’Donnell’s decision, which Pacino was defending, was in fact the wrong one, which made things more interesting; furthermore, Pacino’s conclusive speech proved what his weekend with Chris had meant to him.  And the prep school moment in Scent was almost an after-effect: the true rising action in the film concerned Pacino’s relationship with Chris.  Jamal’s battle with Crawford, on the other hand, distracts from his relationship with Forrester and becomes the film’s centerpiece, but it neither illuminates his character nor complicates the film in any meaningful or provocative way.

Likewise, in comparisons with Good Will Hunting, Forrester makes all the wrong decisions.  The mentor and protégée in this movie are far less interesting than their Hunting counterparts, and Matt Damon (who, interestingly, has a cameo in this movie) did not have to battle any villains.  His job, with Robin Williams’s help, is to transform his life; Jamal’s task, apparently, is to prove his worth to snotty and curmudgeonly English professors.

Finding Forrester isn’t an awful movie.  But Mike Rich’s script too often produces lines that no one would say in real life, the actors don’t do enough to bring their characters to life, and almost every key moment feels forced.  We’re supposed to believe, for example, that a group of tough black street teenagers would be terrified of an old recluse living in an apartment?  Or that Forrester stopped writing because he didn’t like critics were inferring from the first book, even though it was widely praised?

Such questions are bothersome, but ultimately, the film fails because it tries to be a character study and falls short.  Jamal is far too balanced at the beginning to change much, leaving that burden to Forrester, but he’s shaded too thinly for us to care anyway.

I’m sure plenty of people like this movie.  I just didn’t buy most of Jamal’s interactions with Forrester, or the role of the arrogant professor at school, or most of the script.  Does that make Finding Forrester a bad movie?  You can decide that on your own.