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FINDING FORRESTER Send This Review to a Friend
Stories about disadvantaged youth getting a helping hand from an understanding mentor have built-in appeal. That's doubly so when you have a newcomer actor with the skill of Rob Brown and a mentor played by Sean Connery, who has always been an ace of an actor but improves with age. "Finding Forrester," with a melodramatic but uplifting screenplay by Mike Rich and sure-footed direction by Gus Van Sant, benefits from its humanistic perspective and the power of its performances. Contrived, sure, but with a pleasing purpose.
Connery plays William Forrester, a Scottish writer whose reclusive life is a bit like that of J. D. Salinger. In Forrester's case, he produced a renowned novel but in disillusionment has retired from view, has not published again and spends his time looking through binoculars out of a window in his South Bronx apartment and watching inner city youth play basketball. One of the teenagers is Jamal Wallace, a 16-year-old who breaks into Forrester's apartment as a kind of rite of passage requiring that something be stolen. In the getaway he leaves his back-back, which happens to contain some of his writing, which Forrester finds unusually talented. The incident leads to a private mentor-pupil relationship between the lad and Forrester, who is outwardly nasty but inwardly kind.
Jamal has something else going for him. He is a whiz on the basketball court, which gets him a scholarship to a fancy Manhattan prep school. Much like the case of the Martinique boy in the film "Sugar Cane Alley," because he is black and comes from poverty, when he writes creatively, his professor, played with angry bitterness by F. Murray Abraham, is sure he must be copying from someone.
This is the point from which the film builds to melodrama, but Rich's screenplay delivers in the moral uplift department. The drama becomes as much about Forrester opening up his life as it is about Jamal moving forward with his promise as an author. The strange relationship enacted between Connery and Brown is strong and fascinating as it develops, and as you might expect, ultimately there's the obligatory big scene designed to make an audience feel good as it roots for Jamal against his skeptical, vindictive professor. Will you believe it all? Maybe not, but the film has so much going for it that you may still be delighted at the outcome and leave the theater with an understanding of the stakes involved in such a breakthrough and appreciation for the fine acting of both Connery and Brown. A Columbia Pictures release.
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