Finding Forrester
Director: Gus Van Sant
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 2.0
A skilled basketball player with a taste for Mishima and obscure American poets befriends a Pynchon/Salinger-like reclusive author (Sean Connery) who helps him hone his writing skills; unfortunately, there are those repressed white men (embodied by F. Murray Abraham, all tweed and smarminess) who can't fathom that a black kid (!) who likes basketball (!) is quite intelligent (oh my!). This is certainly Connery's best role in years - he somehow makes a potential caricature of the 'hermit' into a plausible human being - but if the character of Forrester could metacriticize the very script he's featured in, he would most likely bathe the pages in red ink, calling it clumsy and, perhaps, constipated. This exercise in Hollywoodized liberal pride is certainly not Van Sant's biggest misstep: that would be either Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Psycho or Elephant, depending on your taste.
