First off, I declare a five-year moratorium on movie titles with active-verb-plus-noun titles. Chasing Amy was fine, clever, and original. But then came Saving Grace, Finding Forrester, the indie Chasing Sleep. It’s no longer clever. It is tiresome. I will name the next film with this pattern Annoying Title.
Now that I’ve gotten that gripe out of the way, let’s discuss the latest -ing movie, Finding Forrester. There is really nothing wrong with this film. It is well-acted by both Sean Connery and newcomer Rob Brown. It’s one of those movies that I enjoyed while watching it, thinking, “Say, this ain’t bad…” but decided to wait a few days to write about it, to let the viewing seep in. And in those few days, the movie completely left my consciousness.
Sean Connery plays William Forrester, a reclusive J.D. Salinger-esque author, a man who wrote only one book that became the ultimate 20th-century novel. Rob Brown plays a black teenager named Jamal that lives in the same neighborhood in The Bronx, New York City. Jamal secretly reads and writes voraciously, but keeps it a secret from his friends and teachers because he doesn’t want to stand out from the norm. He plays basketball with the boys, lives with his mom and brother (played by rapper Busta Rhymes!), and lives a quiet life. One day, Jamal takes a dare to sneak into the apartment of the strange old man who peers at the kids out of a window. He gets caught, and in his haste to escape, leaves his backpack with his writing in the apartment. Old man reads his writing, and with a lot of initial testy apprehension on both sides, the man and boy strike up an unusual mentor/student friendship.
Jamal’s genius is discovered, he gets transferred to a private mostly-white Manhattan school, he butts heads with a bitter writing teacher (F. Murray Abraham), and strikes up a sweet friendship/romance with a white student (Anna Paquin, who doesn’t have much to do). Jamal has to prove to the writing teacher that he is the real thing (since he is, after all, a basketball player, and black, for goodness sakes), and in the meantime Jamal is coaxing his new friend Forrester back into the real world from decades of seclusion.
Finding Forrester has an intriguing premise, since there are mysterious mythical authors out there like Forrester who have kept fans in rapt admiration in their absence. And throwing race into the mix is an interesting plot twist. The film is quite inspiring in a way, as it shows Forrester pounding ideas and prose into Jamal’s head, teaching him how to write straight from the heart and with passion. But Finding Forrester never really gives us a glimpse into what makes Jamal and Forrester such naturally great writers. Jamal’s winning essay is read aloud at an awards ceremony, but the sounds of the words fade out until we are just shown the audience wiping away tears of appreciation at the end. It’s like the movie audience is missing the core of what makes these two characters so unique to start with.
Finding Forrester is not a bad movie, by any means. The acting by the two leads, Sean Connery and Rob Brown, is engaging, and Brown is a surprising good match for the old Bond vet. The film is a bit darker in tone than director Gus Van Sant’s previous movie Good Will Hunting, but in a good way. These people seemed more real, more accessible. But leaving out what makes them tick unfortunately shelves Finding Forrester in the out-of-sight, out-of-mind category of mentor-movies.
