Will Hunting can solve any math problem in the world. He cannot solve himself.

He is twenty years old, works as a janitor at MIT, lives in a rundown apartment in South Boston, and spends his nights drinking with his three best friends—Chuckie, Morgan, and Billy—guys he has known since childhood, guys who would take a beating for him without hesitation, guys whose horizons extend precisely as far as the next construction job and the next bar. Will belongs to this world. He speaks its language. He wears its uniform. He fights its fights. He is also, by any objective measure, one of the most gifted mathematical minds alive.

One evening, a Fields Medal-winning MIT professor named Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) posts an advanced mathematics problem on a hallway blackboard as a challenge for his graduate students. The next morning, it has been solved. Anonymously. Lambeau posts a harder problem. It too is solved. Eventually he discovers the mathematician is Will—the kid who mops the floors.

This should be the beginning of a story about a genius being discovered and given his rightful place in the world. It is not. Because Will Hunting does not want to be discovered. He does not want to be given anything. He does not want to leave South Boston or his friends or the version of himself that has kept him alive for twenty years. He wants to be left alone.

When Will is arrested for assaulting a police officer—not his first offense—Lambeau intervenes with the judge. The deal: Will avoids prison if he agrees to study mathematics under Lambeau’s supervision and attend therapy. Will agrees to the math. The therapy, he sabotages.

He destroys five therapists in rapid succession. He reads their books before the session and uses their own theories against them. He finds their insecurities within minutes and presses until they crack. One therapist he reduces to tears. Another he reduces to rage. He is brilliantly, systematically cruel—not because he enjoys it but because he cannot allow anyone to see him. If they see him, they will see what happened to him. And if they see what happened to him, it will be real.

Lambeau, running out of options, contacts his old college roommate: Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), a psychology professor at Bunker Hill Community College. Sean is not prestigious. He does not have a private practice or a bestselling book. He teaches community college in a working-class neighborhood. He is from South Boston himself—the same streets Will grew up on. And he is carrying his own damage: his wife died of cancer, and he has been quietly drowning in grief ever since.

Their first session goes badly. Will spots a painting in Sean’s office—Sean painted it himself, during a hurricane—and tears it apart with a psychological precision that would make a graduate student weep. He deduces from the painting that Sean married the wrong woman, that he’s hiding, that his life is defined by fear. Sean, in a response that surprises both of them, pins Will against the wall by the throat and tells him never to disrespect his wife again.

Their second meeting takes place outdoors, on a bench in the Boston Public Garden. It is the scene that defines the film. Sean sits beside Will, not across from him—already a different spatial relationship than any therapy office—and does something no one else in Will’s life has ever done: he tells Will the truth about Will’s limitations. Not his intellectual limitations. His experiential ones.

You’ve read every book, Sean tells him. You can tell me about art, war, poetry, love, loss—anything that can be learned from a page. But you’ve never stood in the Sistine Chapel and looked up. You’ve never held a dying friend. You’ve never been in love so deeply that you’d give up a World Series ticket to sit in a bar and talk to a woman. You’ve never been vulnerable enough to let another person truly see you. You know everything and you’ve experienced nothing. And you’re terrified.

Will has no comeback. For the first time in his life, intellect is not enough. Sean has named something that cannot be argued away. And from this moment, the therapy—the real therapy—begins.

It proceeds slowly, painfully, with many false starts. Will and Sean sit in silence for entire sessions. Will deflects with jokes. Sean waits. Will tests boundaries. Sean holds them. Week after week, through the accumulation of small moments—a story about a wife who farted in her sleep, a question about why Will works construction, a shared recognition of what it means to grow up in South Boston—something shifts. Not a breakthrough. A thaw.

Meanwhile, Will meets Skylar (Minnie Driver), a brilliant, wealthy Harvard student studying organic chemistry before medical school. She is everything Will is not: privileged, open, emotionally available, unafraid. She falls for him. He falls for her. And the moment she gets close enough to matter, he pushes her away with calculated brutality—picking a fight, saying terrible things, engineering a breakup that will confirm his belief that he is unlovable.

This is the pattern that defines Will’s life: get close, get scared, destroy the connection before it can destroy you. It is the logic of a child who was abandoned and beaten by every adult who was supposed to protect him. Will was a foster child. He was moved from home to home. He was physically abused—cigarette burns, beatings, the kind of violence that teaches a child that love and pain are the same thing. He learned, very young, that the safest strategy is to never let anyone close enough to hurt you. His intelligence became his armor. His aggression became his perimeter. His loyalty to his Southie friends—the only people who have never betrayed him—became his entire world.

Lambeau sees Will’s genius and wants to unlock it for the world. He arranges job interviews with prestigious firms and government agencies. Will torpedoes every one—brilliantly, of course. In the most famous of these scenes, he demolishes an NSA recruiter by articulating, in a single monologue, the entire chain of consequences that his intelligence work would set in motion. He doesn’t refuse the job because he lacks ambition. He refuses it because he can see, with perfect clarity, what his intelligence will be used for. And he doesn’t want to be used.

Chuckie—Will’s best friend, played by Ben Affleck in the performance that proves he understood this character better than anyone—delivers the film’s most unexpected speech. Chuckie, the construction worker, the guy with no education and no prospects, tells Will that the best part of his day is the ten seconds between pulling up to Will’s apartment and knocking on the door—because every day he hopes Will won’t be there. That Will will have left. That Will will have finally used his gift to become something more than what South Boston offers. Chuckie doesn’t want to hold Will back. He wants Will to leave him behind. This is love without possession. It is the most selfless moment in the film.

And then comes the scene.

Sean’s office. The final session. Sean has read Will’s file—the foster homes, the abuse, the cigarette burns. He puts the file down. He looks at Will. He says four words: “It’s not your fault.”

Will deflects. “Yeah, I know.”

Sean says it again. “It’s not your fault.”

Will deflects again, more aggressively. “I know.”

Sean says it again. And again. And again. Each time quieter, each time closer. Will’s defenses—twenty years of armor, the smartest defenses any human being has ever constructed—begin to crack. He pushes back. He says “Don’t fuck with me.” But Sean keeps coming. Not with analysis. Not with technique. With presence. With the simple, repeated, devastating truth that the child Will was did not deserve what happened to him. That the shame he has carried his entire life belongs to the adults who hurt him, not to him.

Will breaks. He collapses into Sean’s arms and weeps. Twenty years of grief, rage, shame, and self-hatred pour out of the smartest person in the room, held by the only person who ever got close enough to catch him.

The film ends simply. Will turns down the prestigious job. He fixes up the car his friends gave him for his birthday. He leaves a note for Sean: “I had to go see about a girl.” He drives to California to find Skylar. Sean reads the note and laughs—Will has used Sean’s own words, the story about skipping the World Series to talk to the woman who would become his wife. The final shot: Will’s car on an empty highway, heading toward something he has never had. A future chosen instead of endured.

Content Breakdown

Language: Severe by volume. The F-word and its variants appear throughout the film—in nearly every scene of dialogue among Will and his South Boston friends, and frequently in therapy sessions. Additional profanity includes racial and homophobic slurs used casually among the friend group. Context: “The language is authentic to the setting. South Boston working-class speech patterns are rendered without sanitizing or exaggeration. For students aged 15+, the profanity is not gratuitous—it is characterization. These are men who express everything, including deep affection, through profanity. Chuckie’s most loving speech to Will is delivered in language that would get both of them suspended from any school. The film argues, correctly, that eloquence is not a function of vocabulary.”

Violence: One street fight early in the film—a brawl involving punching, kicking, and police intervention. References throughout to Will’s childhood physical abuse, including descriptions of cigarette burns and beatings. Context: “The street fight is brief and realistic. The abuse is never shown—only referenced in Will’s file and in conversation. The film trusts the audience to understand the weight of the words without graphic depiction. For this curriculum, the choice to leave the abuse unseen is itself a lesson in storytelling: sometimes what is not shown carries more power than what is.”

Sexual Content: Post-sexual scene with partial nudity (nothing explicit). Sex-related jokes and dialogue throughout, including graphic verbal humor about masturbation and sexual encounters. Context: “The sexual content is verbal rather than visual. The conversations between Will and his friends about sex are crude, funny, and entirely characteristic of young men in this setting. The one intimate scene between Will and Skylar is handled with restraint—it is about connection, not spectacle.”

Substance Use: Frequent drinking—Will and his friends drink beer in nearly every social scene. Smoking. One brief reference to drugs. Context: “The drinking is normalized within the South Boston working-class culture the film depicts. It is not glamorized—it is simply present, the way it would be in these characters’ real lives.”

Mature Themes: Child abuse and its long-term psychological effects, foster care, class inequality, the relationship between intelligence and emotional development, therapy and resistance to therapy, grief, fear of intimacy, self-sabotage as protection, the tension between loyalty and growth, institutional exploitation of talent. Context: “This is the most psychologically sophisticated film in the Objective #28 lineup. It deals with trauma, attachment disorder, and therapeutic healing with a level of accuracy that mental health professionals have praised. The therapy scenes between Will and Sean are not Hollywood approximations—they represent, with remarkable fidelity, the process by which a skilled and compassionate therapist builds trust with a deeply wounded patient. For students interested in psychology, these scenes alone justify the film’s place in the curriculum.”

Why This Film Works for Developing Unconditional Love and Compassion

If Dead Man Walking asks whether compassion can extend to someone who has done the worst, Good Will Hunting asks something equally difficult: whether compassion can reach someone who won’t let it in.

Will Hunting is not a villain. He is not a bad person. He is a wounded person who has built the most sophisticated defense system imaginable—an intellect so powerful it can dismantle anyone who approaches—and who uses that system to ensure that no one ever gets close enough to hurt him again. His problem is not that the world refuses to love him. His problem is that he refuses to let it.

This is the form of suffering that is hardest to extend compassion toward, because it looks, from the outside, like choice. Will chooses to stay in South Boston. He chooses to sabotage job interviews. He chooses to push Skylar away. He chooses to destroy therapists. From the outside, he looks like a man who has everything and refuses to use it—and there is a real temptation, especially for people who have not had Will’s advantages of intellect, to feel frustrated rather than compassionate. Just take the opportunities. Just accept the help. Just let people in.

The film’s argument—and its contribution to Objective #28—is that you cannot choose to let people in when every experience of being “let in” has resulted in pain. Will’s defenses are not stubbornness or pride. They are survival mechanisms developed by a child who learned, through repeated and violent experience, that closeness equals danger. You cannot reason someone out of trauma. You cannot lecture them into vulnerability. You cannot present them with logical arguments for why they should trust you when every person who was supposed to be trustworthy hurt them.

What you can do is what Sean does: show up. Again and again and again. Be honest. Be present. Be willing to be hurt yourself. Tell the truth about your own damage—Sean lost his wife, carries his own grief, has his own limitations he freely admits—and demonstrate, through the accumulation of small moments of genuine connection, that not everyone who gets close will cause pain.

Sean’s compassion for Will is unconditional not because he approves of Will’s behavior—he clearly doesn’t; he pins Will against a wall in their first meeting—but because he refuses to give up on Will regardless of what Will does to push him away. This is the practice of unconditional love at its most practical: not a feeling but a decision, renewed every session, to remain present with someone who is doing everything in their power to drive you away.

For students in this curriculum, Good Will Hunting teaches the second principle of Objective #28: unconditional love is not just for the guilty (as in Dead Man Walking). It is also for the wounded. And sometimes the wounded are harder to love, because their wounds make them cruel, and their cruelty makes them look like they don’t deserve compassion, and the whole cycle perpetuates itself until someone—some Sean Maguire—is stubborn and patient and honest enough to break through.

The “It’s not your fault” scene is the most famous therapy scene in cinema not because it is dramatic but because it is true. The repetition is not a screenwriting trick. It is how healing works. The truth has to be said again and again and again, not because the person doesn’t hear it intellectually—Will’s first response, “Yeah, I know,” is intellectually honest—but because the distance between knowing something in your head and knowing it in your body is the distance between reading about love and being held. Sean crosses that distance through repetition, proximity, and presence. By the time Will breaks, it is not because Sean has said something new. It is because Sean has said the same thing enough times, with enough genuine care, that Will’s body finally believes what his mind has always known.

This is what unconditional love looks like in practice: saying the true thing until it lands. Showing up until the door opens. Being patient enough to outlast the armor.

Characters as Individuals

Will Hunting is Matt Damon’s defining role—a performance so calibrated that you can watch the film ten times and still discover new layers of defense and vulnerability operating simultaneously. Damon plays Will as a young man who has split himself in two: there is the Will who moves through South Boston with easy confidence, quick fists, and quicker wit, and there is the Will who solves Fields Medal–level mathematics alone at night, who reads voraciously, who carries an entire library in his head. These two Wills cannot coexist in the same room—and the terror of the film is watching what happens when someone tries to introduce them.

Damon wrote the character from deep personal knowledge of Boston’s class geography—the invisible line between South Boston and Cambridge, between the kids who clean the buildings and the kids who study in them. His Will is not a Hollywood genius—no eccentricities, no charming quirks. He is a young man whose brilliance is indistinguishable from his pain, because both were forged in the same fire.

Sean Maguire is Robin Williams’ masterwork—the role that proved, beyond any remaining doubt, that the comedian was one of the great dramatic actors of his generation. Williams plays Sean with an exhaustion that feels lived-in rather than performed. This is a man who has stopped trying. His wife is dead. His career has plateaued at a community college. He paints during hurricanes and drinks alone and teaches students who will never appreciate what he has to offer. He is, in his own way, as stuck as Will—and part of what makes their therapy work is that Sean is not healing from a position of strength. He is healing alongside Will, learning to live again even as he teaches Will to start.

Williams improvised throughout filming—Van Sant gave him a minimum of seven takes per scene so he could explore different emotional textures. The wife-farting story was entirely ad-libbed; Damon’s laughter is genuine, and the camera shakes because the operator was laughing too. But the improvisation that matters most is invisible: the warmth, the timing, the way Williams calibrates Sean’s responses to Will with the precision of a musician who knows exactly how hard to press and when to release. Williams won the Oscar. It was his only Academy Award. He was found dead in 2014, at age 63.

Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck) is the character most audiences underestimate—and the one who delivers the film’s most profound statement about love. Chuckie is not smart. He knows it. He will work construction his whole life and drink in the same bars and never leave South Boston, and he has made his peace with this. What he cannot make peace with is watching Will do the same thing. Chuckie’s speech—telling Will that he hopes every day to knock on Will’s door and find him gone—is an act of love so complete it includes the willingness to lose the person you love most. Affleck wrote this character from personal experience: his father had worked as a custodian at Harvard, and the class divide between the people who clean the buildings and the people who inherit them was not abstract for him.

Skylar (Minnie Driver) is the character who tests Will’s capacity for love in real time—and who demonstrates, painfully, how trauma turns intimacy into threat. Driver plays Skylar as genuinely open and unguarded, which makes Will’s cruelty toward her all the more devastating. She is not naive—she sees Will’s damage clearly—but she is willing to love him anyway, and Will’s response to her willingness is to detonate the relationship. Harvey Weinstein initially objected to casting Driver; Damon and Affleck insisted. Driver was nominated for the Oscar.

Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) represents a form of love that is real but insufficient—the love of talent rather than the love of a person. Lambeau genuinely wants the best for Will, but his definition of “the best” is shaped entirely by his own values: academic prestige, mathematical achievement, the world of ideas. He cannot understand why Will would choose South Boston over MIT. His failure is not one of caring—he cares deeply—but of imagination. He cannot imagine that Will’s suffering matters more than Will’s gift.

Themes for Deeper Discussion

Armor and the cost of intelligence:

Will’s genius is both his greatest asset and his most effective weapon. He uses it to keep people away, to control every interaction, to ensure he is never vulnerable. The film asks: when does a strength become a prison?

Discussion questions:

• Will uses his intelligence to destroy five therapists before Sean. Why does Sean survive where the others didn’t? What is different about Sean’s approach?
• Think about your own strengths—the things you’re best at. Have you ever used a strength as a defense mechanism? How does a talent become armor?
• Will can analyze any book, any painting, any mathematical proof. Sean tells him he’s never actually experienced any of it. What is the difference between knowing and experiencing? Why does the distinction matter?
• The film suggests that intellectual brilliance without emotional vulnerability is a kind of imprisonment. Do you agree?

Class, loyalty, and leaving:

Will’s loyalty to South Boston and his friends is genuine and beautiful—but it is also a cage. Chuckie’s speech asks Will to leave. The film asks: when is loyalty to your origins a form of self-destruction?

Discussion questions:

• Chuckie tells Will that staying in South Boston would be an insult to those who don’t have Will’s options. Is this fair? Does having a gift create an obligation to use it?
• Many people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel guilt about “leaving”—moving to a different class, a different world, a different life. What is the relationship between loyalty and growth?
• Lambeau and Chuckie both want Will to leave South Boston—but for different reasons. What is the difference between Lambeau’s desire and Chuckie’s?
• Think about your own community. Are there ways in which belonging to a group limits what you feel you’re allowed to become?

Therapy as love:

The relationship between Will and Sean is, at its core, a love story—not romantic, but profound. Sean loves Will unconditionally, and that love is expressed through the practice of therapy.

Discussion questions:

• What makes Sean an effective therapist? Is it his technique, his personality, his willingness to be vulnerable, or something else?
• Sean shares personal details about his own life—his wife, his grief, his regrets. Is this appropriate for a therapist? How does Sean’s vulnerability help Will?
• The “It’s not your fault” scene works through repetition. Why is repetition necessary? Why can’t Will accept the truth the first time Sean says it?
• Have you ever had someone say something to you that you “already knew” but hadn’t really felt? What made the difference between knowing and believing?

“I had to go see about a girl”:

Will’s final decision—to drive to California and find Skylar—is not about a girl. It is about choosing vulnerability over safety. It is the first truly free choice Will has ever made.

Discussion questions:

• Will turns down the prestigious job and goes to find Skylar instead. Is this the right decision? Is love more important than achievement? Or is the question itself wrong?
• Sean once skipped the World Series to meet the woman who became his wife. Will uses Sean’s own words in his farewell note. What does this echo mean?
• The film ends with Will driving alone on an empty highway. We don’t see him arrive. We don’t see the reunion. Why does the film end here? What is the significance of the journey rather than the destination?

Visual Literacy

Van Sant’s Vision

Understanding the directorial choices deepens appreciation:

The park bench: The most famous scene in the film takes place not in a therapy office but on a bench in the Boston Public Garden—a park where parents bring children to ride swan boats. Sean chooses this location deliberately. It is public, open, non-clinical. There is no desk between them. They sit side by side rather than facing each other. The framing says: this is a conversation between two people, not a session between doctor and patient. Van Sant holds on Williams for the entire monologue without cutting away—a choice that requires absolute trust in the actor’s ability to carry the moment. Williams delivers. After his death, fans turned this bench into a memorial.

The barriers: Cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier (who died in 2003, shortly after the film) constructs the visual grammar of intimacy through barriers and their absence. Will’s therapy sessions with the failed therapists are shot in conventional office settings—desks, chairs, clinical distance. Sean’s sessions begin in the same configuration but gradually break free of it: the park bench, the walks, the moments where the camera finds them at the same level, in the same light, occupying the same emotional space. By the final session, the camera is close enough to see individual tears.

South Boston versus Cambridge: Van Sant and his production team create two visual worlds. South Boston is shot in warm, lived-in tones—narrow streets, dive bars, crowded apartments, the L Street Tavern where Williams insisted on filming after Affleck and Damon took him there. Cambridge and MIT are shot in cooler, more institutional tones—wide hallways, empty classrooms, fluorescent light. The visual contrast maps directly onto the film’s class argument: South Boston is messy and alive, Cambridge is impressive and sterile.

Elliott Smith’s music: The soundtrack is as essential as Deakins’ cinematography was to Dead Man Walking. Smith’s songs—quiet, intimate, aching—provide the emotional register that Will cannot articulate. Van Sant had Smith’s music in mind during filming and told his editor to incorporate the songs early. Smith’s voice—thin, fragile, nearly whispered—becomes the voice of Will’s interior life, the part of him that feels everything he pretends not to feel. Smith performed “Miss Misery” at the Oscars, visibly uncomfortable in his white suit among the spectacle of Hollywood, and the discomfort was its own kind of truth: here was a man whose art was about rawness and exposure, standing in the most performative room in the world. Smith died six years later. His music in this film remains one of the most perfect marriages of song and story in American cinema.

The “It’s not your fault” scene: Van Sant shoots this scene almost entirely in close-up, alternating between Will and Sean’s faces. As Sean repeats the phrase, the camera moves incrementally closer to both actors. The physical distance between camera and face mirrors the emotional distance between Sean’s words and Will’s defenses. By the time Will breaks, the camera is so close that his face fills the screen entirely—there is nowhere left to hide. Van Sant shot many takes; Williams wanted variations that focused on different emotions. The final edit uses the take where both actors are completely present, neither performing, both simply being human in the same room at the same time.

Creative Extensions

The bench conversation: Sean tells Will that knowing everything about art, war, and love from books is not the same as experiencing any of it. Choose a subject you know intellectually—from reading, studying, or watching—and write about the gap between your knowledge and your experience. What would it take to cross that distance?

Chuckie’s goodbye: Chuckie tells Will the best part of his day is hoping Will won’t be there. Write about a time when love required you to let someone go—or when someone loved you enough to push you toward something they couldn’t follow. What does selfless love look like when it costs you the person you love most?

The letter you couldn’t write at fifteen: Will’s childhood abuse is the engine of his self-destruction. Write a letter from the adult version of yourself to the younger version—the version who was hurt, or scared, or told they weren’t enough. What would you say? What truth would you repeat until it landed?

Five therapists and one Sean: Will destroys five therapists before Sean breaks through. What made the difference? Research one principle of effective therapy—attachment theory, unconditional positive regard, the therapeutic alliance—and write about how Sean embodies it. What can non-therapists learn from Sean’s approach about how to be present with wounded people?

The class geography: The film draws a sharp line between South Boston and Cambridge. Map the class geography of your own community. Where are the invisible lines? What happens when someone crosses them? Write about the social cost of moving between worlds.

Your “It’s not your fault”: Is there something you’ve been told—or need to be told—that you know intellectually but haven’t felt in your body yet? Write about the gap between cognitive understanding and emotional belief. What would it take for the truth to land?

Related Viewing

Other films about therapists who refuse to give up:

• Dead Man Walking (1995, R—violence, language) — Sister Helen Prejean as spiritual therapist to a man on death row; ages 16+. Also recommended for this curriculum.
• Ordinary People (1980, R—language, mature themes) — Another breakthrough therapy relationship, with a devastated family; ages 15+
• A Beautiful Mind (2001, PG-13) — A genius whose mind is both gift and prison; ages 13+

Other films about class and belonging:

• The Intouchables (2011, R—language) — Friendship across class lines, where each person gives the other what they’re missing; ages 14+. Recommended for Objective #27.
• Billy Elliot (2000, R—language) — A working-class boy whose gift pulls him out of his community; ages 13+
• Educating Rita (1983, PG) — A working-class woman and an alcoholic professor who educate each other; ages 13+

Other films about learning to be vulnerable:

• Amélie (2001, R—sexual content) — Another brilliant person who must learn that the interior life is not enough; ages 16+. Recommended for Objective #27. 🇫🇷
• Harold and Maude (1971, PG) — Another emotionally shut-down young person broken open by an unlikely connection; ages 16+. Recommended for Objective #27.
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012, PG-13) — Trauma, friendship, and the courage to participate; ages 14+

The music:

• Elliott Smith — Either/Or (1997) and XO (1998). For musically inclined students, Smith’s work is an education in emotional honesty through songwriting. His whispered vocals, fingerpicked guitar, and lyrics about self-destruction and longing provide the emotional vocabulary for the kind of interior pain Will carries but cannot express. Smith’s biography—a troubled genius who struggled with addiction and depression and died young—adds a layer of poignancy to his contribution to this film that becomes more profound with time.

Recommendation: Essential viewing for students aged 15+. The language is pervasive but authentic; parents who are concerned about profanity should know that the film uses it as characterization rather than provocation. There is no graphic violence or sexual content.

What makes Good Will Hunting essential for Objective #28 is not its famous scenes—though the park bench monologue and the “It’s not your fault” scene are among the most powerful moments in American cinema—but its cumulative argument about what unconditional love requires. It requires showing up. It requires honesty. It requires the willingness to be hurt yourself. It requires patience measured not in minutes but in months. It requires saying the true thing again and again until the person you’re saying it to can finally hear it in their body instead of just their head.

Sean Maguire is not a saint. He is a grieving, imperfect man who drinks too much and lives too small and has his own walls to tear down. But he shows up for Will. Session after session, insult after insult, deflection after deflection—he shows up. And in the end, that is what love is. Not a feeling. Not an idea. A practice. A verb. The decision to remain present with someone who is doing everything in their power to make you leave.

Will Hunting can solve any math problem in the world. The only problem he cannot solve is the one that requires him to stop solving and start feeling. Sean doesn’t solve it for him. Sean just stays in the room long enough for Will to solve it himself.