Finding Forrester is a 2000 movie, written by Mike Rich and directed by Gus Van Sant, about a teenager, Jamal Wallace, played by Rob Brown, who is accepted into a prestigious private high school. He also befriends a reclusive writer, William Forrester, played by Sean Connery.
Anna Paquin, F. Murray Abraham, and Busta Rhymes also star in supporting roles. Matt Damon makes a brief cameo appearance near the end of the film. Principal photography was shot entirely in Manhattan , the Bronx, and Brooklyn (many Mailor Academy scenes were filmed at Regis High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan), with some scenery and pick-up shots made in suburban Toronto, Ontario, during post-production. Parts of the film were also shot in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.[1]
The movie is also famous for a particular line in the movie's trailer. Connery utters the phrase "You're the man now, dog," which became a popular internet meme, and was also the inspiration for the website YTMND.com.
Plot
Finding Forrester is the story of Jamal Wallace's life in the rough world of the inner city. Although Jamal is intellectually gifted, he puts little effort into his schoolwork to avoid criticism from his friends. On a dare, he sneaks into a recluse's apartment and, to his surprise, befriends the inhabitant. The man helps Jamal with his writing, in exchange for Jamal keeping a secret: the man is William Forrester, the secluded author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Avalon Landing, his only published book. When a highly selective private school, Mailor Callow, sees Jamal's test results, he is offered a scholarship. Jamal accepts, although it is a major culture shock to go to this elite school. He is immediately befriended by a board member's daughter, which eases the transition.
Later, a professor named Crawford accuses Jamal of plagiarism because he incorporates the first paragraph and title of an essay by Forrester into one of his papers. The essay had been written by Jamal in Forrester's apartment, and despite the fact that he was told to keep anything he in Forrester's house in Forrester's house, he turned it in. In the end, Forrester leaves the apartment after all of those years, pays a surprise visit to the school to address the professor's accusations in person, and reads one of Jamal's writing samples in order to prove his innocence.
Forrester moves back to his homeland of Scotland, where he dies of cancer. He leaves Jamal his apartment and a manuscript of his second and final novel, 'Sunset'. It is to be published by Jamal after he has written a foreword.
Critical response
When Finding Forrester opened in December 2000, it received mostly positive reviews. It garnered two thumbs up from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper. Roeper went so far as to say it was one of the ten best films of 2000.
Connections to Authors
Connections to Salinger
Although William Forrester is a fictitious character, there are some noticeable parallels between his life and that of the American author J. D. Salinger.
- Both Forrester and Salinger are notoriously reclusive authors.
- In the movie Forrester had at least one story published in The New Yorker. Salinger had several published.
- In the movie Forrester has many unpublished works. Salinger is believed to have several novels and stories that are unpublished.
- In the movie Forrester blocked a biography of himself that the character Prof. Robert Crawford was going to have published. Salinger did the same thing through a lawsuit against Ian Hamilton.
- Screenwriter Mike Rich mentions that it was the apparently unsociable traits common to some revered American authors (including Salinger and Thomas Pynchon) which inspired the story [2]
- Both also only wrote one book that is wildly popular: Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye and Forrester's Avalon Landing
- In his Glass family stories, Salinger's narrator, Buddy Glass, is obsessed with his dead older brother Seymour. In the movie, Jamal, discussing Forrester's novel, tells Forrester that he thinks there was somebody else. Forrester also has a brother who is dead.
Connections to Bradbury
- An alternative parallel can be found in Ray Bradbury's semi-autobiographical Dandelion Wine in which one of the leading characters is named William Forrester and is an author with a single published book.
References
External links
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