Good Will Hunting Character Analysis

Few movies have the ability to captivate and move an audience like Good Will Hunting. The story is a touching tale of a rebellious young man, Will Hunting (Matt Damon), who struggles to find his identity, living in a world where he can solve any problem, except the one brewing deep within himself. After being booked on assault charges, Will Hunting is allowed to leave prison on two conditions, taking math classes with a professor who recognizes his brilliance and mandatory therapy. Coupled with the support of his friends and girlfriend, and the help of his therapist Sean (Robin Williams), Will begins to deal with his low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, and past physical abuse. As Wills’ character progresses throughout the film the audience witnesses …show more content…
The audience sees from the very beginning that Will kept his inner circle of friends relatively small and he was only candidly open with his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck). Coupled with a coarse personality Will was quick to push everyone away from him before they had the opportunity to get to know him. Correspondingly after Will finds himself in mandatory therapy sessions as a condition of his parole, he begins a destructive path of frustrating multiple therapists to his amusement and to the discontent of professor Lambo. However, to Wills’ bewilderment he meets his match with a therapist named Sean. Sean is introduced to the audience while lecturing a class on trust, “Trust...very important in a relationship, it's also very important in a clinical situation. Why is trust the most important thing in making a breakthrough with a client?”. In the beginning Will attempts to dissuade Sean as he did to the others by making crude remarks and obscene assumptions. However, Sean who had a similar upbringing to Will quickly countered his insensitive assertions and ended the session. From this point forward Will slowly began to open up to Sean as Sean dissected his behavior. Sean would later explain to Will that he acted the way he did because of his traumatic childhood where he was conditioned to not trust anyone. Sean implores Will, telling him that if he wants to ever have a