Perfect symmetry

I hadn't ever seen Good Will Hunting even though a number of friends told me I should watch it. Finally, I happened on to it on one of the movie channels earlier this week. So, I watched it. Yes, I should have taken everyone's advice who told me to watch it. It was good on several levels.

One feature I like about a movie or a book is for there to be some line or some episode referred to again in the end. In one of the scenes in the middle of the movie, Robin Williams, playing an esteemed psychologist, relates to Will that he married the one true love in his life. So he enjoyed his marriage to the very end. He was passionate about going places with her or compromising his own thoughts if making her happy would be the end result. When she fell sick before she died, it was not a chore for him to care for his one true love in life. He related that story because Will had earlier flippantly suggested to the psychologist (without knowing the story behind the psychologist's state of being single) that he was scared to marry again because he married the wrong woman. Thus, Robin Williams found the right moment to relate having met the woman of his dreams to Will. He had given up going to a historical baseball event just to be with this woman for their first date. And, he never regretted it. In fact, he would have regretted attending the baseball event and missing the meeting with the woman of his dreams.

At the end of the movie, Will had a job that would catapult him to fame and show his unique abilities as a world class mathematician. But through his therapy with Robin Williams, he had learned to care about people again (which he had lost the ability to do through a series of events). In particular, he wanted to go reclaim a relationship with a woman so that he would have no regrets. So, he left a note with Robin Williams to tell the person offering him a job that he had somewhere else to be, with the woman of his dreams that he was going to meet. Beautiful symmetry. In literary terms, it's the perfect way to highlight a major theme.

From my observation of married couples, I would have to say that precious few individuals find their one true love. So seeing it portrayed in a movie is moving. Seeing it highlighted as a theme by seeing such a unique passion for another human being pass from one individual to another is even more touching.

In reality, just a taste of it for a few precious moments in time would be life's single most treasured event. Living it would place one in the most enviable position in the whole world.