Finding Forester

Finding Forrester

Finding Forrester is the story of Jamal Wallace's, played by Rob Brown in his first motion picture, life in the rough world of the inner city. Early on we find that Jamal is very intellectually gifted from his scores on the standardize test, but he doesn't try to succeed in school so that he won't be secluded from his friends. On a dare, he sneaks into a mysterious apartment, but leaves his backpack behind when is surprised by the old man. When the old man tosses the backpack out his window the next time Jamal is passing by, Jamal is surprised to find that the old man actually had commented on all of his writing, using such phrases as where are you taking me and constipated writing. Jamal goes back to the apartment and to his surprise, befriends the inhabitant. The man helps Jamal with his writing, in exchange for Jamal keeping a secret: the man is William Forrester, played by Sean Connery, the secluded author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Avalon Landing, his sole book. During this time Sean Connery says something to Rob Brown's character that has gained a strong following on the internet, "You're the man now, dog!"

When a highly selective private school, Maylor Callow, sees Jamal's test results and basketball skills, he is offered a scholarship. Jamal accepts the scholarship after his mother, brother, and Mr. Forrester tells him it is what he should do. He is immediately befriended by a board member's daughter, which eases the transition.

Later, a professor named Crawford accuses Jamal of plagiarism because he used the title and first paragraph of one of Mr. Forrester's essays on one of his own. The essay was previously written by Jamal in Forrester's apartment, and despite the fact that he was told to keep anything he wrote in Forrester's house, he turned it in. That's as much as I am going to tell you for it ruins this great movie's ending.

I feel the role of the teacher in a student's life is something the viewer can take from this film. I felt the charter of William Forrester was more of a Father figure to Jamal than anything else, though he did help Jamal grow in his writing. Professor Crawford is shown as an unfair teacher that wants other to suffer because of his own difficulty to publish a book. He picks on Jamal especially because he is a black student from the Bronx and "just another basketball