He looks like the product of a factory churning out Leonardo DiCaprio clones, and he couldn't, by his own admission, get so much as a parking ticket in Hollywood until very recently.

But Matt Damon is the person currently standing between Yorkshire and an Oscar.

Good Will Hunting, a complex drama of relationships which he wrote and in which he stars with Robin Williams, is nominated for no fewer than nine Academy Awards this month. Damon himself stands to win not only the award for Best Actor but that for Best Original Screenplay, too - a category in which Keighley's Simon Beaufoy, writer of The Full Monty, is the sole British hope.

But is Good Will Hunting as good as Hollywood clearly thinks it is?

My own view is that the film as a whole is not as great as the sum of its parts; Damon and especially Williams are mesmerising, as are Damon's real-life ex-girlfriend Minnie Driver and his real-life childhood friend Ben Affleck. But the story has come straight out of a Teach Yourself Screenwriting manual.

It's not that in writing the piece Damon wasn't sincere; he had, after all, spent five years hawking it around Hollywood, much as Stallone had done with Rocky, many years before. But an overdose of sincerity and a singular lack of anything more challenging does not a memorable movie make.

Damon plays the eponymous Will Hunting, an orphanage kid who has worked his way up to the position of lavatory cleaner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and whose natural genius for mathematics puts even the professors there to shame.

Upon being arrested for punching a policeman, he is taken under the wing of Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard), a mathematician of such acumen that he can even understand paperwork from the Inland Revenue.

But Damon, perhaps because his deprived childhood has made him distrustful of everyone around him, does not want to be helped. He makes fools of various psychologists and counsellors, and it is only the benign presence of Robin Williams, an old college friend of Professor Lambeau whose own life is in the doldrums, that can make him recognise the potential of his own genius.

The film's most touching moments are those involving Damon and Minnie Driver as an English college girl. The knowledge that the actors themselves were also falling in love gives the scenes an extra poignancy.

Good Will Hunting is a fine film in many ways. But at the end of the day, the emotional journey of the principal character is neither deep enough nor eventful enough to truly carry it.

Come the Oscars telecast on March 23, I'll be rooting for Simon Beaufoy.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.