Happy hunting

Finding Forrester extends good will

Peter Keough

Directed by Gus Van Sant. Written by Mike Rich. With Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Busta Rimes, and Michael Nouri. A Columbia Pictures release. At Framingham.

Despite the hostile response to his near frame-by-frame re-creation of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Gus Van Sant doesn't seem to have shaken off his repetition compulsion. At first

glance his Finding Forrester seems like another version of Good Will Hunting with a few minor changes. There's the volatile inner-city prodigy, the crusty mentor, the lovingly detailed funky neighborhood, the circle of homeboy friends. There's even Matt Damon, sort of. As opposed to what happened with Psycho, however, here Van Sant improves on the original -- just the absence of Robin Williams, bad Boston accent and Oscar and all, is a plus. Some might accuse the director of selling out the edgy independence and chimerical inventiveness of his earlier work, but with films like this he seems to be filling a more important niche, making mainstream movies that are cannily crafted and at times even subversive -- feel-good movies that also make you feel uneasy.

Sometimes it takes only a pair of complementary shots to challenge the status quo. Forrester opens with a long shot of a window in a corner brownstone in the South Bronx. Those looking on include 16-year-old Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), who's shooting hoops with his friends across the street. A spectral figure passes; it's "The Window," the local equivalent of To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley. On a dare, Jamal agrees to break into the apartment and bring back something to prove he did. Some two-plus film hours later, he's got his booty in hand, but the shot is reversed, with the basketball court seen from the window. It's a new point of view, true for Jamal, and perhaps for the audience as well.

In the beginning, though, he's the star basketball player of his local high school, and his friends are cool with that. He's also a talented writer, something he suspects is not so cool. He writes secretly in a diary he keeps in his backpack -- and that's what he leaves behind when he's surprised by the denizen of the mystery apartment he's broken into. Said denizen is none other than the legendary William Forrester (Sean Connery), who made his mark 50 years before by writing "the great American novel" (odd, given his Scottish accent). Since then he's vanished into a J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness that's now broken by his chance encounter with Jamal's jottings. The two become friends of a sort, with Jamal opening the blinds of Forrester's world a crack and Forrester honing Jamal's talent (his writing advice is actually intelligent) and stoking his ambition, encouraging him to accept a scholarship to a tony prep school in Manhattan.

Forrester relies on the kind of plot devices that make movies of this type embarrassing, but Van Sant springs them with the savvy innocence and fairy-tale terror and charm (the apartment and the stairway leading up to it are much spookier than, for example, anything in Van Sant's Psycho) that are among his more endearing traits. That and his knack for drawing out unexpected and haunting performances. First-timer Rob Brown is the acting discovery of the year, demonstrating a subtle intensity in his laconic line readings and weighty timing. His physical grace and palpable intelligence make a strong case that if any 16-year-old is capable of both slam dunks and brilliant prose, it's him. Connery has a tougher time as a character whose genius and flight from success are never satisfactorily explained, and neither does first-time screenwriter Mike Rich acquit himself well in trying to re-create the master's prose. But the warmth of growing intimacy and the vulnerability of age come through, especially in a scene where Forrester ventures out into the world with his friend, only to lose his way.

Van Sant loses his way a little himself when Jamal enters the clubby confines of his new school. There the film verges into Dead Poets Society and Scent of a Woman terrain, with F. Murray Abraham playing a variation on Salieri as Professor Crawford, a weasely embodiment of the those-who-can't-do-teach calumny who doesn't believe someone like Jamal can write as well as he does and goes to embarrassing lengths to prove him a plagiarist. A more compelling complication is the spark of attraction between Jamal and Claire (Anna Paquin), his fellow student and the daughter of one of the board of directors. No Matt-and-Minnie amours are indulged in here, sad to say -- apparently an interracial teen romance is too risky for the director of Drugstore Cowboys and My Own Private Idaho. He's a sly one, though -- perhaps with the new point of view established by the film's conclusion, such a subject might not be so risky any more.