Finding Forrester
dir. Gus Van Sant
Columbia Tristar

The last time I cried at the movies was in 1989 when I first saw Dead Poets Society. Growing up in a little North Dakota burg under a school system whose commitment to averageness was absolute, this tale of a messianic, attuned teacher beaten down by his emotionally cloistered peers in front of a host of uncomfortable-in-their-own-minds students was, to say the least, deeply felt. When the kids clambered onto their desktops and started O-Captain-my-Captaining Robin Williams ... no wonder he’s been on a martyr kick ever since. When Williams’ character says, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Yeah!

Of course, back then when I was 12, I also thought Ghost Dad was really funny.

That’s perhaps a harsh way to dismiss a movie whose cues are ingrained into me so well I still have Pavlovian responses to them, but I can’t fall under its sway anymore — its bald sentimentality is sour to me, even under Peter Weir’s sensitive direction. But that was half my life ago, meaning that there’s a whole generation in need of a Dead Poets Society that was made during its lifetime. And so somewhere — I mean, yeah, North Dakota, but lots of other places, I’m sure — an army of adolescents is no doubt anxiously awaiting a movie like Finding Forrester.

Which isn’t to say that Finding Forrester isn’t for adults, too, but they’re much more likely to see through it. Directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Mike Rich, Finding Forrester comes loaded for bear with the-review-writes-itself ironies — it’s an underwritten movie about writing, a clichéd portrait of two men defined by their originality. The set-up of the story is that Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) gets a new teacher and a new school; the two developments, however, aren’t related.

The new teacher is William Forrester (Sean Connery), an urban-legend-calibre recluse whose top-story tenement apartment overlooks the street court where Jamal and his crew play. Without getting too deeply into the clunky mechanics of the plot, Forrester gets ahold of Jamal’s writings — writings Jamal buries under a thick layer of underachievement in order to fit in comfortably with his friends — and when Jamal gets them back, they’ve been red-inked up with Forrester’s corrections. Forrester, it’s revealed, wrote one great novel many decades back and disappeared, living off its royalties as well as in isolation for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent. In fact, so long as those reasons aren’t discussed and so long as Jamal doesn’t tell anyone who he’s writing with, Forrester says he’ll tutor Jamal, and the two are soon inseparable.

The new school comes about when Jamal, whose standardized test scores and b-ball prowess are both exceptional, gets the opportunity to transfer out of his Bronx high school to a prestigious private academy. It’s clearly the right choice for Jamal, and it will almost certainly provide an arena for him to exercise his literary talents — if not for Henry Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), his new English professor and an unpublished writer that’s dubious about Jamal from the get-go — namely, how could the kid be this good on paper and on the court?

As in most Van Sant movies, there’s plenty offered up to think about, but rarely are so many of those topics so quickly discarded as they are here. It’s fine if Van Sant and Rich don’t want to address cans of worms like standardized testing and urban public education, but what about interracial dating, private institutions’ athletics-driven form of affirmative action or the Wallace family dynamic, all of which are flittingly and fleetingly addressed? (Seriously: Jamal spends all his time with Forrester, whom he can’t tell anyone about. Can his mother not get one scene to explain how she feels about this?)

The problem is that Rich’s script is really good when sequestered in Forrester’s apartment with Jamal and Forrester — the characters breathe and grow in equal measure, with Connery giving a career performance and Brown turning in an outstanding debut. But the rest can be hard to get through; fully half the scenes before we first meet Forrester are thudding exposition-droppers that would get you failing marks in screenwriting class, and the climax is an overripe, desperate amalgamation of other mentor/protege movies. (Two words: Hoo-hah.)

That climax is curious, the culmination of perhaps the strangest undercurrent of the movie. Forrester suggests, pretty strongly, that critical misinterpretation is one of the main reasons he’s given up writing. (It’s less hackneyed than the other, later-revealed reason.) In fact, the ceiling keeping Crawford in mediocrity is that Forrester told publishers not to pick up Crawford’s biography/deconstruction of four great authors because Forrester was one of the studied and Crawford’s analysis was, to his mind, wrong. There is no end to the motivations a writer can give to a petty teacher, and Rich takes an unusual route to this Mozart/Salieri knot — it’s not that Crawford wrote a lesser book than Forrester but that Crawford subjected Forrester to academic study. That story choice is a poser indeed, and it’s puzzling why Van Sant may have found it attractive (cough cough cough Psycho cough cough).

Movies feature disparaging ideas about criticism and analysis once in a while, and it always seems like a ploy to establish a critic-proof sphere around the movie. A hot tip to all art consumers: This is a cheat every time — art that makes a point of thumbing its nose at criticism usually has some spectacularly bad credibility crevice (often regarding its resoultion) about which it’s drawing a line in the sand. Finding Forrester’s isn’t spectularly bad, just threadbare and with the mildewy odor of seen-it-all-beforeness. The movie delivers a lot of pleasures — as ridiculous as it is, there’s a definite thrill when Jamal keeps cutting off Crawford by completing the snippets of literature Crawford is trying to use to put him down, and Connery and Brown are both indubitable delights here — but I suspect it’ll seem awfully shopworn to the seasoned viewer.

If we’re fully disclosing, however: I’ve never heard the sentiment from the above Dead Poets Society quote put better than it is there, and Robin Williams delivers it marvelously. I can’t read it without remembering it, and I can’t remember it without feeling the hairs on my neck straighten. (Dead Poets Society, it should be noted, was another criticism hater with major last-act credulity issues.) I have no doubt that Finding Forrester will have a similar effect on its generation, and affection for it won’t be ill-placed. It’s just that, like so many well-intentioned movies, Finding Forrester’s main problem is that if it were only better, it would be great.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)