Finding Forrester

by CHRISTOPHER TOOKEY, Daily Mail

Finding Forrester is a bewilderingly blatant attempt by director Gus van Sant to plagiarise his own movie, Good Will Hunting.

This time, the boy genius is not a white mathematician but a black writer (Rob Brown), and his out-of-school mentor is not a psychoanalyst but an older author, William Forrester (Sean Connery). The film is otherwise almost identical.

The main threat to the boy genius is at the posh, predominantly white school where an envious, covertly racist English teacher (F. Murray Abraham) acts as envious Salieri to the boy’s Mozart. But Amadeus, this isn’t.

Nothing about the film convinces, from the old author’s rotten literary advice – start writing without a plan or structure, and they will come to you (but then again they may not) – to the too-good-to-be-true black teenager’s lack of interest in any authors except dead white males.

The attempts to portray literary talent are embarrassing, and the verbal battling between bad master and good pupil suggests misleadingly that creative talent goes hand in hand with memorising literary quotations.

Connery growls a lot in order to add gravitas but can’t find depth or conviction in his ill-written character, who emerges as an extremely tiresome poseur.

All signs of intelligent life are sacrificed to Hollywood formula and liberal wish-fulfilment. The film cops out from its early theme of inter-racial romance, with the result that the talented Anna Paquin is wasted as our hero’s female admirer.

The ending is awash with phoney sentimentality and ludicrously unprofessional behaviour. Just watch the discomfiture of poor Richard Easton as the boy’s headmaster, required by the script to do things no real-life head would countenance for a moment.

If you want a revealing account of teacher-pupil tensions and the creative process, check out Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire in Wonder Boys.

And if you can stand to see a ruthlessly honest account of how posh private schools really treat black teenagers on a scholarship, treat yourself to the wonderful documentary Hoop Dreams.

Click below for more reviews of this film.

Share or comment on this article: