Good Will Hunting

            Movie posters tend to represent the main idea of the film and also show the main characters in the movie.  In my opinion, the movie poster for Good Will Hunting does exactly that.  In the picture above we can see one younger man laughing – enjoying himself, and to his left we see an older guy looking on with a look that can be interpreted in many ways.  I view this look as a confused yet prideful gaze.  I immediately think that he’s happy to make the younger man smile and laugh, but at the same time he wants to get more out of the younger man.  Maybe I’m reading into this too much because I’ve seen the movie, but that’s what I get out of the picture.  The main plot of this movie is the exploration of Will Hunting’s (the younger man) life that he chooses to live.  Despite being a genius, he works as a blue collar worker and spends his days drinking and getting into fights.  He’s an orphan who has clearly experienced several traumatic events in his life and has developed a defense mechanism of pushing people away before they can get close to him.  During the movie Will meets a girl who begins to cross his personal boundary into unknown territory while also meeting with a therapist who can get inside his brilliant mind.  Based off the movie poster almost nobody would be able to guess the full plot of this movie, but it does the best possible job to give the movie-goer a brief idea of what the movie could be about.  For genre, I look at the poster and see one man laughing and one man looking very serious.  Due to this, I think it would be a comedic-drama which it actually is.  As for characters, the young man looks joyful in the poster, but we can also see the older man acting as somewhat of a mentor to the younger man.  This perfectly describes their relationship during the film.  There could have been more characters on the poster, but I believe they correctly put the two most influential characters on the cover.  “For the first 20 years of his life, Will Hunting has called the shots.  Now he’s about to meet his match.”  This is the catch phrase used in the movie poster and it gives perfect insight to the picture and to the plot of the entire film.  Will Hunting goes through seven psychologists before going to Sean where he meets a man he can trust and confide in.  If there was one thing wrong with this movie poster, it would be the exclusion of Will Hunting being a genius.  I’m not exactly sure how they would have incorporated that into a movie poster, but looking at the poster gives no indication of how smart the younger man is.  Otherwise, I think this movie poster can do no wrong.  It perfectly entices viewers with a simple yet perplex picture of the relationship between two great men.