Hollywood seems incapable of making a movie about super smart or talented people without saddling them with emotional or mental problems. TIME looks at the best.
Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is wicked smart (He’s from south Boston, so he says wicked a lot). Will works blue-collar gigs, drinks lots of beer and likes to cause a ruckus. He’s also a genius who likes to pass the time by solving obscure mathematical equations. This Oscar-winning film, written by future stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and directed by Gus van Sant, seems to suggest that serious emotional problems can be solved by the love of a good woman, a solid cry and a hug from Robin Williams.
Geoffrey Rush won a Best Actor Oscar for this portrayal of David Helfgott, a young piano prodigy whose hard-driving father eventually propels him into a nervous breakdown. Institutionalized for several years, Helfgott eventually finds love and makes one of those grand, standing-ovation-type comebacks we’ve come to expect in films about broken artists. Predictable turns aside, it’s Rush who dazzles (hah! thought we were going to say “shine,” didn’t you?) as the schizophrenic whose madness, writes TIME critic Richard Corliss, is “a nice mad, not angry or morose.” In other words, crazy, but not crazy crazy.
