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It is a psychology manual of the young genius Will (Matt Damon): an orphan adopted and with a violent stepfather.
His closest friends are books: chemistry, psychology, etc. But it is mainly mathematics that consoles his wounded heart. Mathematics – a black beast for many, a beloved spouse for many others – with its mysterious and inseparable pair of beauty and truth, is the hook in the sky that allows Will to escape from the real world with its complex and inextricable web of compromises, disappointments, and opinions that constitute human relationships.
Will works as a janitor at MIT (the most important technical school in the world). There he solves a problem left open by Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), winner of the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize for mathematics. Lambeau quickly realizes that Will is a black pearl. The boy is internally devastated but, for some mysterious reason, his wounded soul finds unity and security when dealing with mathematics.
Gerald takes him to psychologists to rebuild him. But Will has read all the psychology books and it is he who psychoanalyzes the psychoanalysts.
Then he decides to take him to his dear friend, Sean McGuire (Robin Williams), who agrees to help him. The first meeting is not the best. Will has already figured him out and knows how to hurt him. Instead of psychoanalyzing him, he psychoanalyzes the painting of his deceased wife: “She was screwing another.” Will wants to see the psychologist’s reaction, he wants to immediately show him who holds the upper hand. But Sean is not one of those psychologists who hides his torments behind good manners; he doesn't care about appearing weak and fragile. He grabs Will by the neck and says: “If you disrespect my wife again, I’ll finish you. I’ll fucking finish you.”
The second meeting doesn’t go much better: it's the silent game.
Then a third meeting in front of a beautiful lake. Sean psychoanalyzes Will truthfully but without a sense of superiority: “You’re a genius, who denies that. But behind your arrogant air, hides a bully who’s scared shitless.” Then Sean himself bares his soul, recounting how his wife, with her love, literally pulled him out of the inner hell he had fallen into.
Those who admit their fragility always evoke empathy. Will is touched. Sean is not pretending and doesn’t want to appear better than he is. He too needed salvation. He can be trusted. At the next meeting, they begin talking about baseball – sport is always an extraordinary way to make friends – and gradually move on to more serious matters.
With progress in university and psychology comes love as well. Will meets Skylar (Minnie Driver), a brilliant and charming girl from Harvard who falls in love with the inner beauty of the young genius and asks him to go live in California with her. Faced with this request, Will's fears resurface: what if by getting to know me, you discover I’m not as I seem and you stop liking me? They are the fears of someone who uses their head too much and their heart too little and who has closed off everything due to past pains. Will is intellectually a giant, but emotionally a scared child. Skylar tells him to stop thinking and let go: “Let’s give it a shot.” But in mathematics, there is no daring. There is only true and false; at most conjecture. Will can’t risk it. It’s over.
But the self-destructiveness doesn't end here. One day Will burns the page of a theorem proof that Professor Lambeau cannot prove. While trying to put out the fire, the luminary tries to make Will understand what nature has given him: “It’s true, Will, I can't do this proof. And I don’t know what I would give to have your talent. What pain to see you throw it away.”
Will also refuses a job at an important scientific center. He is destined to do wonderful things, but he uses his genius only to invent ingenious excuses. Sean is not fooled by the nonsense and points it out to him. Will retorts:
“I didn’t want that job. I never asked for it”
“You were born with it Will. So don’t say nonsense like “I never asked for it”. What do you want to do, Will?”
“I want to be a shepherd. Herd sheep…”;
“If you want to jerk off, grab a wet towel”;
“He’s kicking me out. I thought we were friends”;
“You’re just wasting my time”;
“You give me life lessons. But look at yourself, damn, you’re a misfit”;
“I, at least, played a hand”.
Will doesn’t want to play his hand in love because, at his time, he was abandoned and now he's afraid of being abandoned again; and he doesn’t want to play it in work because he’s also afraid of failure, thinking that beautiful things are necessarily destined to end. It’s the memory of his past that prevents him from freeing himself. Will understands the deepest theorems that luminaries cannot understand and doesn’t understand the simplest thing: that if we want life can be beautiful.
His friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck) works as a construction worker but you don’t need a degree to tell the truth: “You’re sitting on a lottery ticket but you’re too spineless to cash it. And it’s bullshit.”
A friend is a friend. Will accepts the job and goes to make peace with Sean who, in the meantime, has compiled a psychological report on him: affective deficits causing great fears of the future.
A memorable dialogue arises between the two where each reveals to the other the violence suffered. Then Sean reveals to Will – who has read many psychology books and thinks he knows it all – something he doesn’t know:
“Will, all this shit is not your fault”;
“I know”;
“No. You don’t know. It’s not your fault”;
“I know”;
“No. You don’t know. Son: it’s not your fault”;
“I know”;
“No. You don’t know. Repeat: it’s not your fault.”
Each of us is the architect of our destiny, and our faults are only ours, and we cannot offload them onto others to feel less of the burden. The unnatural stepfather who raised him transmitted to Will his sense of guilt that Will’s highly sensitive heart – genius is nothing but a superior sensitivity that is not granted to us normals – did not have the strength to send back to the sender. If people knew how to reject, with a deep act of will, the guilt that true culprits continually send us, half of the psychologists would be unemployed.
Will cries. The tears have healed his inner wound which has finally closed. Will will stop punishing himself for what he suffered in the past. The fault is not his. The most trivial truths are sometimes the most difficult and laborious to understand. Understanding this is worth more than all the Fields Medals and all the Nobel Prizes. Then our hero, between the certain scientific glory that awaits him in universities worldwide and the unpredictable love waiting for him in California, will make the first gamble of his life.
A film to (re)discover and (re)watch. A film that might be more helpful than many costly hours spent with a psychologist.
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