The
Value of Friendship: Why is Jamal and Forrester’s friendship significant in the
film?
Friendship
is a huge part of everyone’s life, whether they know it or not. In Finding
Forrester, a movie that takes place in the Bronx, has two main characters -
William Forrester and Jamal Wallace who become friends in an unlikely way
because of their passion for reading and writing. Though both are very
different from each other, they are drawn together by similar interests.
The
characters are different in many ways, Forrester is a male in his mid-seventies
who lives by himself. He confines himself to his apartment for years. His only
way to the outside world is when he leans out the window to clean off the
grimes. Forrester is non-confrontational. He would rather handle a problem
behind closed doors than confront the person face to face. For example, when
Jamal’s professor thinks he used a tittle from another author’s writing without
permission, he demands Jamal to write a letter of apology and read it in front
of the class.
Jamal
is an ambitious young black teenager, who grows up in a poor neighborhood and wants
to become something in the future. He is a pacesetter, a hardworking kid who
dismantles stereotypes by doing well in school.
The friendship between Jamal Wallace and
William Forrester has some good moral lessons. First, William Forrester is
helped to overcome his reclusiveness by going out with Jamal to the basketball
stadium. For Jamal, however, the friendship helps him overcome the racial
prejudice against him and pursue his dream of becoming a great writer.
One of the scenes I like most is inside
the classroom, when Mr. Crawford calls on a student to answer a question, and
Jamal jumps into the conversation. Jamal tells the student to say his name. The
student’s last name is the answer to the question. Mr. Crawford becomes clearly
upset that Jamal knows the answer to the question he asked of the other
student. Mr. Crawford tries to say some quotes that he thinks Jamal doesn’t
know, but Jamal finishes the quotes for Mr. Crawford. This upsets Mr. Crawford
so much so that he orders Jamal to leave the classroom immediately because he is
embarrassed by the young boy’s intelligence.
Jamal
does not have a good relationship with his teacher, Mr. Crawford because he
does not like Jamal being smart as a black kid.
“My
name is William Forrester. Excuse me. I’m that one. Losing family. Losing
family obliges us to find our family. Not always the family that is our blood,
but the family that can become our blood. Should we have the wisdom to open our
door to this new family, we will find that the wishes we had for the father,
who once guided us, for the brother, who once inspired us…The only thing left
to say will be: “I wish I had seen this, or I wish I had done that, or I wish…”
Most of you are too young to know what those wishes will be. But when I read
these words…words of hope, dreams…I realize that the one wish that was granted
to me, so late in life was the gift of friendship”.
The
above quote shows how William Forrester values his friendship with Jamal
Wallace. The quote also shows how important friendship plays in the film,
because it is through the friendship that Jamal becomes the writer he has
always wanted.
