Meanwhile, Lambeau pushes Will so hard to excel that Will eventually refuses to go to the job interviews that Lambeau has arranged for him for positions that might prove challenging, even to his immense talents. Sean's own pathology is that he is unable and unwilling to even consider another romantic relationship in the aftermath of his beloved wife's premature death from cancer several years before, possibly the primary reason why Sean agrees to take Will on as a client. Will challenges Sean in the same way that Sean is encouraging Will to take a good, hard, objective look at himself and his life. This doctor-patient relationship, however, is far from one-sided. Will is spurred to try to establish a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), a young woman he met at a bar near Harvard.
Cashback movie plot synopsis series#
In a later session, Will is particularly struck when Sean tells him how he gave up his ticket to see the Red Sox in the 1975 World Series (missing Carlton "Pudge" Fisk's famous home run in the Sox infamous "Game 6") in order to meet and spend time with a stranger in a bar, who would later become his wife. However, Sean sees Will as a challenge and tells Lambeau to bring him back each week. Sean becomes offended and hostile and grabs Will by the throat, threatening to sink his chances for reform, at which point Will ends the appointment and walks out Lambeau walks in believing that Will has ruined his chances with yet another therapist. At one point, Will analyzes a watercolor painting that Sean had done himself and concludes that it reflects Sean's suppressed feelings and guilt over the premature death of his wife. Sean differs from his five predecessors in that he is also from South Boston and pushes back at Will and is eventually able to get through to him and his hostile, sarcastic defense mechanisms. Out of sheer desperation, Lambeau finally calls on Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), an estranged old friend and MIT classmate of his. Five psychologists fail to connect with Will. Will chooses the latter even though he seems to believe that he does not need therapy. Realizing Will might have the potential to be a great mathematician, such as the genius Évariste Galois, Lambeau intervenes on his behalf, offering him a choice: either Will can go to jail, or he can be released into Lambeau's personal supervision, where he must study mathematics and see a psychotherapist to help him with his anger and defensive personality. A few days later Will attacks a youth who had bullied him years before in kindergarten, and he now faces imprisonment after hitting a police officer who was responding to the fight - a tough judge refuses to be tricked by Will's sharp knowledge of law precedent, which includes citing a case from the 1700s. A potential fight is eventually defused and Will finds that Skylar is attracted to him, getting her phone number. Will steps to Chuckie's defense, matching Clark step-for-step with historical facts he'd memorized. One of Skylar's fellow co-eds, Clark (Scott William Winters), tries to humiliate Chuckie, challenging his knowledge of American colonial history. At the bar, Chuckie spots a beautiful woman, Skylar (Minnie Driver) and he hits on her, claiming to be a Harvard student himself. One night after work, Will and his best friend Chuckie and a couple of their other friends go to a bar near Harvard University. When Will turns out to have solved it correctly, Lambeau tries to track Will down. Will is discovered in the act of solving it, and Lambeau initially believes that Will is vandalizing the board and chases him away as Will insults him. Everyone wonders who solved it, and Lambeau puts another problem on the board - one that took him and his colleagues two years to prove. The first week of classes, Will solves a difficult graduate-level math problem that Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), a Fields Medalist and combinatorialist, left on a chalkboard as a challenge to his students, hoping someone might solve it by the semester's end. Hence, he is unable to maintain either a steady job or a steady romantic relationship.
Cashback movie plot synopsis professional#
An abused foster child, he subconsciously blames himself for his unhappy upbringing and turns this self-loathing into a form of self-sabotage in both his professional and emotional lives. Though Will Hunting (Matt Damon) has genius-level intelligence (such as a talent for memorizing facts and an intuitive ability to prove sophisticated mathematical theorems), he works as a janitor at MIT and lives alone in a sparsely furnished apartment in an impoverished South Boston neighborhood.