Character Development In Finding Forrester

Life makes people make major decisions and some of those decisions will be for the better and some will make your life worse. Trauma can lead to having to make these decisions. Like if the everyone around you makes you angry in a major way you could choose to isolate yourself from them or you could face them and later move on from them. In the film “Finding Forrester” the director Gus Van Sant utilizes character development to suggest the idea that isolation is psychologically harmful to people.

In the beginning of the film Forrester is isolated from the world to the point where the only time he goes outside is to wash the outside of his windows. He has someone who does his grocery shopping for him and he will never talk to anyone else. This …show more content…
After Jamal takes him out of the stadium he takes him to the pitcher's mound of the old Yankee stadium where he begins to open up to Jamal about him and his brother going there to watch all of the games, this is showing that having a taste of the outside world again had helped him remember what it is like to have relationships with other people such as his brother and now with Jamal. At this point in the story Forrester seems to get more friendly with Jamal and a more happy person in general. Talking to Jamal about his brother helped Forrester to move on from the past and begin to think about the future and about not being so isolated. The director is showing how Forrester is realizing his isolation was a bad idea and he should have just looked towards the …show more content…
After going to the school Forrester realizes that the outside world is not as bad as he thought it was when he decided to isolate himself and he realizes how much he could be doing with his life rather than sitting in his apartment and watching people through his window. Forrester decided to return to his homeland of Scotland and explore how things have changed since he was last there. At the end of the movie you find out that he had an amazing time in Scotland and he was so happy he made the decision to go back. This is eluding to the idea that he wishes he never would have left and isolated himself. The director wanted to show that Forrester seemingly wished he had never isolated himself the way he did because it shows the people watching the movie that isolation is bad for people and people who do it regret it.

Gus Van Sant used the development of Forrester’s character in the movie “Finding Forrester” in order to show the negative psychological impacts of isolation. These impacts can range from anger to grieving about your past and can all be caused by a bad decision that you made in direct response to a traumatic event. These kinds of decisions are ones that everyone has to make and that some people make correctly and some people make the wrong