Advertisement

The Best Thing Here: Finding a Fresh Face

Share
TIMES FILM CRITIC

“Finding Forrester” is “Good Will Hunting in the Bronx,” and whether that is good news or not depends on how you reacted to the original Boston-based production.

Once again we meet a gifted young person who prefers to hide his accomplishments from his peers and an experienced mentor who learns a lesson or two himself as he helps the youngster find a place in the world. Once again, Gus Van Sant is directing and, in case we miss the connection, there’s even a cameo for “Good Will” star Matt Damon.

One more time, as well, we’re presented with a well-oiled piece of Hollywood machinery, pat and overly familiar but tolerably entertaining until it piles on the contrivances at the close. And “Finding Forrester” does have advantages in the acting department, and not necessarily the ones you might think.

Advertisement

Sean Connery is the film’s star as well as one of its producers, but his I’m-crankier-than-you-are performance, though glib and entertaining, feels like a reprise of a lifetime of greatest hits. More affecting, and more surprising, is the debut work done by a 16-year-old actor named Rob Brown.

A novice who never even thought of acting before he tried out for this part, Brown turns out to be something of a natural. His wary and dignified presence, nicely set off by a great smile, enables him to make working with Connery appear simple, and he has enough self-possession to look, even if unintentionally, a bit embarrassed at the shenanigans that are taking place around him.

Brown plays Jamal Wallace, a 16-year-old African American who lives in the Bronx with his mother and expends a good part of his energy keeping his braininess, and especially his interest in writing, hidden from friends who are happiest considering him nothing more than an excellent basketball player and regular guy.

Jamal and company play ball on a court that faces a venerable prewar apartment house, on whose top floor lives a mysterious binocular-wielding presence the kids call, in one of debuting screenwriter Mike Rich’s nicer touches, the Window.

Lots of strange urban legends have grown up around the Window, and when Jamal, on a dare, goes up to investigate, he ends up leaving behind a knapsack containing the journals he’s been surreptitiously writing. Imagine (just imagine!) Jamal’s surprise when those journals get returned with pithy comments like “constipated thinking” and “this passage fantastic” written all over them in red.

His curiosity aroused, Jamal goes back and begins a tentative protege relationship with this strange old recluse (Connery, of course), prickly and prone to mind games, who spends most of his time drinking scotch in his pajamas in his Miss Havisham-type ruin of an apartment.

Advertisement

At just about this time, Mailor-Callow, one of Manhattan’s top prep schools, shows an interest in Jamal largely because of his basketball prowess. It offers to take him out of the Bronx, which, though it looks about as dangerous as Mayberry with car fires, is conceded to be not the best place to get an education.

Mailor-Callow is so upper-crust it might as well have “Give me your rich, your bored, your over-privileged” carved in stone above the entrance. Fortunately, Jamal finds a guide who speaks the language in Claire Spence (Anna Paquin), a young woman with the kind of world-weary attitude that rarely survives high school. He also acquires a nemesis in a viperish English teacher named Crawford (F. Murray Abraham).

It’s at Mailor-Callow that Jamal discovers the Window’s secret identity. Believe it or not, the boy is being tough-love-tutored by the legendary William Forrester, an author who essayed a J.D. Salinger-esque withdrawal from the literary world after winning the Pulitzer Prize with his first novel 40 years earlier.

There is a smooth, practiced charm to all of this, but, even with Connery fulminating for all he’s worth, it wears thin. Plot strands, like a rivalry with another Mailor-Callow athlete and even Jamal’s friendship with Claire, disappear without a by-your-leave, and even the inevitably bumpy relationship between Forrester and Jamal, though amiable enough, is never completely convincing. Even fairy tales could use a bit more substance than this.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for brief strong language and some sexual references. Times guidelines: appropriate for older teens.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘Finding Forrester’

Sean Connery: Forrester

Rob Brown: Jamal

F. Murray Abraham: Crawford

Anna Paquin: Claire

Columbia Pictures presents a Laurence Mark Production, in association with Fountainridge Films, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Gus Van Sant. Producer Laurence Mark. Executive producer Jonathan King. Screenplay by Mike Rich. Cinematographer Harris Savides. Editor Valdis Oskardottir. Costume designer Ann Roth. Additional music Bill Frisell. Production designer Jane Musky. Art director Darrell K. Keister. Set decorator Susan Tyson. Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes.

Advertisement

Exclusively at the AMC Century 14, Century City Shopping Center, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 289-4262.

Advertisement