Finding Forrester
The Elements of Style
The problem with Finding Forrester is that it is about a writer. Two writers, actually; a reclusive one-hit wonder novelist and a young high school student. It seems like a wonderful idea for a movie at first blush, but it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because it’s almost impossible to make a good movie about writers.
Unlike doctors, or lawyers, or astronauts, or secret agents, writers have a lousy track record in the movies. I can’t tell you why, exactly, but Hollywood has this funny notion that writers are… well… weird. And neurotic. And, sometimes, psychotic.
Don’t believe me? There are three actors who have won recent Academy Awards for their portrayal of writers. Jack Nicholson won for As Good As It Gets, playing a romance novelist with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a symphony of weird, neurotic habits to go along with it. Nicolas Cage won for Leaving Las Vegas, playing a alcoholic writer with depression and suicidal tendencies. And Daniel Day-Lewis won for My Left Foot, playing Christy Brown, the Irish poet who was no ray of sunshine, either. Not to mention that three — no, wait, four, counting Sean Connery in this movie — of the contenders for Best Actor this year are actors playing struggling, neurotic writers; Michael Douglas dealing with writer’s block in Wonder Boys, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the deeply neurotic screenwriter in State and Main, and Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade in Quills, about whom the less said, the better.
And that’s just the top of the order. Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry. The ditsy Kathleen Turner in Romancing The Stone. Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train. Jeremy Davies in Saving Private Ryan Fred MacMurray in The Caine Mutiny. Philip Seymour Hoffman, again, in Almost Famous, and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, playing real-life gonzo journalists. And that’s just the performances I can think of off the top of my head. Special consideration, of course, goes to Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Spacey; Hannibal Lecter wrote articles for psychology journals, and John Doe in Se7en was a prolific diarist. (Two exceptions help prove the rule. Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love came off pretty good; a little frantic, but mostly a levelheaded performance. Denzel Washington’s Hurricane Carter wrote a book in The Hurricane,, but he wasn’t what you’d call a writer, primarily.)
In fact, the best way to show that a writer is at least relatively sane is to pair him with another character who isn’t. James Caan was superstitious and twitchy in Misery, but any mental problems he might have had were overshadowed by Kathy Bates’s character. And then there was James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, playing a reclusive 1950’s novelist, obsessed with baseball, who defiantly wants to be left alone, paired with the mightily confused Kevin Costner. “You’re seeing a whole team of psychiatrists, aren’t you?” Jones asks at one point.
It is this last character that is the model for William Forrester (Connery), who we’re told produced the 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and never wrote another published word again. (Ernest Hemingway actually won the 1953 Pulitzer for “The Old Man and the Sea”. The Pulitzer committee didn’t give a prize for fiction in 1954; would have been much more respectful to Papa Hemingway to have chosen that year, instead. But I digress. I do that.)
Forrester lives in a decaying apartment in the Bronx where he watches Jeopardy!, collects his royalty checks when he remembers to, drinks J&B scotch, neat, and watches the songbirds fly and the young men in the neighborhood play basketball. And he writes a little; and reads a little. (Or at least I think so; I have a sneaking suspicion that the large pile of books on the table are volumes of the Federal Reporter; federal circuit court decisions are nobody’s idea of leisure reading.) And that’s about it.
Forrester is silent, withdrawn, mysterious; a South Bronx urban legend known as “The Window”. (One can’t help but wonder if the nefarious New York rent control laws have something to do with his continued residence in the neighborhood.) On a dare, young Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) breaks into Forrester’s apartment; he tries to swipe a memento but instead ends up leaving his backpack behind. The next day, the pack is thrown out the window; Forrester has made corrections and comments in a series of notebooks containing Jamal’s thoughts and writings. The two form a relationship, with Forrester commenting on Brown’s work.
This should have been a perfectly good basis for a movie. Unfortunately, the screenplay falls for one of the biggest traps in the movies today. It believes that drama derives from situations, not from relationships. The meat of the story of Finding Forrester should be the relationship between Connery and Brown. Instead of having faith in that relationship, instead of counting on the actors to handle the heavy lifting in the movie, the screenplay relies on a set of contrivances to create dramatic tension. The script has Brown attending an exclusive Manhattan private school and locking horns with F. Murray Abraham, who plays the sort of teacher who took to education only because it paid better than pulling the wings off flies. He ends up in a romantic entanglement with Anna Paquin. who may be thankful for her thankless part if only to get to play a relatively normal character for once. And he ends up playing the key role for the school’s basketball team in the Big Game, of course. Finding Forrester depends on these scenes for manufacturing dramatic tension instead of finding a purer, more resonant version in the dialogue between the reclusive old man and the struggling young writer.
What’s annoying about Finding Forrester is that director Gus Van Sant certainly knows better. Finding Forrester pales in comparison to Van Sant’s stellar Good Will Hunting, which handled the mentorship relationship between Matt Damon and Robin Williams with infinitely more humor, depth and caring. Furthermore, Good Will Hunting had the sense to keep its Bad Guy character — Damon’s abusive father — offscreen for all but one simple, effective moment; while the Bad Guy teacher in Finding Forrester consumes lots of screen time indiscriminately. Van Sant had faith in the relationship between Damon and Williams — not to mention the relationships between Damon and Ben Affleck, and Damon and Minnie Driver — and his faith was repaid ten times over. Here, Van Sant apparently has more faith in the meandering subplots than he has for the real story, the true heart of the piece.
None of the subplots are bad, necessarily, but they belong in another, lesser movie. The subplot with Paquin, for example, leads to one of the movie’s clunkier moments. Connery and Brown are talking about something or other, and Connery interjects; “So what about this girl you’re always telling me about?” Brown is silent, as well he might be; to the audience’s knowledge, he hasn’t said anything about the girl to Connery. But he has, though, and the audience just hasn’t been around to hear it. We’ve been left out of part of the conversation, we realize. Then we realize we’ve probably been left out of the good parts of the conversation, and feel somewhat cheated.
The parts of the conversation we do hear aren’t that great, and mostly don’t revolve around writing but around Forrester’s eccentricities. We get to hear why he wears his socks inside-out, and some of his personal story, and how he blackballed F. Murray Abraham from getting his book published. We don’t get to hear him really teach Brown how to write, though — we only get the barest hint of what either of them are writing about, even. We get to hear them discuss the language exactly one time, but it’s on a grammar rule; it’s a little like Strunk talking to White. (Actually, that would be a much better movie than Finding Forrester. Much.) Brown’s writing abilities — the elements of his style, if you will — are what draw him to Forrester, what draw him out of the South Bronx and into Manhatttan, what set him apart from his classmates, what attracts the enmity of Abraham. But there’s very little of it on display.
This is a shame, because that’s what the movie is supposed to be about, and it’s not about that. And it’s also not about the relationship between Brown and Connery, which it also should be about. (This is not the fault of the actors, mind you; Connery does a sterling job, and Brown more than holds his own.) Instead, it turns into a parable against racism — not even racism, really, but what our new President calls the “soft bigotry of low expectations”; its goal is to set up the loathsome F. Murray Abraham as a straw man and knock him all to pieces. It does that effectively, but that shouldn’t be all it does.
One of the central scenes in Finding Forrester has Brown standing at the free-throw line in the big game. He shoots the ball, and it goes a little long, hitting the glass, bouncing off the rim. Clink. Clunk. It’s more than a missed free throw, it’s a metaphor for the movie. Finding Forrester ought to have been an easy shot, but it bounces off the rim and falls flat on the floor. Clink. Clunk. Crash. Finding Forrester is a missed foul shot of a movie. And it’s all the more painful because it has many of the elements of style in place, but no idea how to put them together.