TALES OF YOUNG MEN AND THEIR DREAMS OF GLORY

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

For the moment, which may extend to Academy Awards night, Matt Damon has cornered the always busy market in youthful, affronted innocence. And you have to admit he's pretty good at it. In The Rainmaker, playing Rudy Baylor, a young, undertrained lawyer trying his first case, he shows a nice sneaky knuckler, tracing an erratic path toward the strike zone. In Good Will Hunting, he pitches a sharp curve ball as a brilliant autodidact, confused by his own genius, alternately angry and vulnerable. Yet whether Damon has a high hard one, a true star's blowback fastball, is not a question these movies permit him to answer.

But The Rainmaker, cleverly adapted by Francis Ford Coppola from a John Grisham novel, is honest, commercial fun, and Good Will Hunting, which is written by Damon and his co-star (and old buddy) Ben Affleck, is finally dishonest, but in ways that will delude the impressionable into thinking it's saying something important.

Meantime, however, a couple of cheers for Coppola, who satisfies at least one ruling critical principle: any movie that offers successful employment to Mickey Rourke and Teresa Wright cannot be all bad. He's the only shyster in town who's willing to take a chance on young Rudy; she's his landlady who is nowhere near as ditsy as she looks. And like the rest of a constantly bestartling supporting cast, led by Jon Voight and Danny DeVito as deliciously disparate masters of legal sleaze, they're terrific. Another good rule is not to take Grisham novels as seriously as the writer does when you bring them to the screen, and Coppola fulfills that imperative too. This one is about a big insurance company trying to cheat a poor family out of medical payments that might save a boy's life. Justice in this matter is eventually served, but with comic klutziness and realistic ambiguity.

For a while, it's possible to hope that Good Will Hunting may partake of the same exuberant spirit. Damon's title character, Will Hunting (isn't that cute?), is a janitor at M.I.T., solving impossible equations a professor leaves on a blackboard. After hours, though, he joins his lowlife South Boston cronies for stupid boozing and brawling. Class issues, rarely raised in American movies, seem about to be interestingly engaged. But no, Will's inability to find love and embrace his upscale destiny is the product of childhood abuse, the memory of which he must recover. This brings on Robin Williams as--what else?--the humanist shrink, himself a troubled soul, but, like Will, redeemable (they are both baseball lovers). Hearts sinking, we are obliged to endure much pseudo-serious gabble as we head toward another painfully predictable triumph of the human spirit. There must be some better way of hunting our--and Oscar's--goodwill.

--By Richard Schickel