Sean Connery plays the title character, a J.D. Salinger-esque reclusive author who grumpily befriends Jamal (Rob Brown), a teenager from the projects who's a budding writer and talented basketball player. Together they learn the true meaning of friendship, or some such slop, when an evil, bitter teacher at Jamal's posh new prep school accuses him of plagiarizing and the hermetic, crotchety Forrester is the only one who can clear his name. Bet you'll never guess what happens.
(By the way, ever notice how how these guys who publish one brilliant novel and then nothing for decades are always viewed with this mystical aura, and everyone suggests they never wrote again because they were angry at the way people received their book or fed up with the publishing world, when the truth probably is that the guy had only one good book in him, period, and he's doing his legacy a favor by never publishing again?)
Connery and Brown work very well together (though Brown, in his first movie, is often flat playing against other actors) and have some terrific scenes; in fact, I liked this movie for the first half or so, though it was slow to get moving and I frequently had trouble hearing the dialogue. But a nice little story about two diametrically opposed people becoming friends isn't good enough, so we have to have Drama, in the form of a trumped-up crisis (it's a new one on me that you're absolved of plagiarism if you can get the person from whom you plagiarized to say it's okay with him) and two or three different climaxes, all of which you can see coming from a country mile away.
Nor is the supporting cast any good. I'll wager this may be your only chance to see F. Murray Abraham and Busta Rhymes in the same movie, but do you really care? Is Joey Buttafuoco in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo going to get you into the theater? (If so, I feel very, very, very sorry for you.) If you're feeling especially masochistic, you may wallow in Anna Paquin's supremely grating performance as a pouty, smug rich girl who's rebellious in a high-societally acceptable way (though we're clearly meant to think she's bold and sexy). Matt Damon has a cameo at the end, but when I saw him, with that short blond hair and snub nose, honest to god, the first thing I thought was, "It's Wojo, here to recruit Jamal to Duke!" (Because Jamal is so going to Duke. I mean, duh -- he's a fantastic basketball player and wicked smart. Where else would he go?)
Here's an example of just how terrible and unironically clichéd this movie really is. The singularly dull basketball game Van Sant shows is, of course, the championship game, and of course the opposing team is ahead by one point, and of course Jamal takes the final shot, and of course he's fouled just as the buzzer sounds, and so the entire game comes down to his making one free throw to tie and two to win, and honest to god Van Sant spends like five minutes doing close-up shots of everyone who's had anything to do with this kid, including one guy who's been in the movie for all of 15 seconds up to that point and spoken all of two words to any major character and has zero connection to the plot yet still gets his close-up, and they all have looks of intense yearning and suspense, and pouty Anna Paquin is chewing her lip, and Moms is hiding her eyes, and the evil teacher is sneering, and not only the championship but Jamal's scholarship to the hoity-toity private school hang in the balance as he's being blackmailed, and we've already seen him make 50 free throws in a row earlier in the movie... it's just sickening. I mean, it's beyond parody to show the timer at 00:00 and the score being 62-61 and the kid at the line and all that crap.
The word that kept coming to mind throughout the movie was "uninspired." There's a scene where Forrester is typing away maniacally, without pausing for thought, rhapsodizing to Jamal about how you have to write first and think later, and playing in the background is delirious jazz, which is obviously meant to evoke a spirit of improvisation, free-flying bebop -- but the movie never feels so loose and inspired. It's leaden and lifeless, a spiritless exercise in formulaic movie-making that's meant to be uplifting but instead feels depressing because it comes from a man who used to take risks.
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