Will Hunting (Matt Damon)’s Timeline and Summary
- We see Will hanging out in his apartment and reading in the movie's opening credits. A short while later, we see him mopping the hallways at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Will heads to a bar with his buddy Chuckie, but he ducks out early to go home and work on a math problem that some prof at MIT left on a hallway chalkboard. He never tells anyone at the school that he solved the problem, though.
- Will and some buddies hang out one night at a Harvard bar. While there, Will embarrasses a pompous Harvard guy and gets the phone number of a pretty Harvard girl named Skylar. They agree to hang out sometime.
- Later on, Will solves an even more difficult problem on the MIT chalkboard. But he gets caught by Professor Lambeau and runs off before Lambeau can question him. Whether he knows it or not, he just solved a problem that only a handful of people in the world can solve.
- While hanging with his buddies one day, Will gets into a fight and ends up hitting a cop when the police arrive to break it up. This gets him sent to jail for assaulting a police officer.
- By this time, though, Professor Lambeau has tracked him down. He makes a deal with Will's judge to let Will out of prison on two conditions. The first is that Will has to work with Lambeau on math problems and the second is that Will has to go to therapy.
- Will mentally destroys his first couple of therapists. But he meets his match when he runs into Sean Maguire, an old friend of Professor Lambeau's.
- Will gets under Maguire's skin by talking about his dead wife, but Maguire pushes on and continues to meet Will. Over time, they develop some trust with each other.
- The harder Maguire pushes Will to grow up, the harder Will pushes back. Eventually, Will totally snaps and walks away from Maguire's therapy.
- Then he also pushes Skylar away when she says she loves him and wants him to move to California with her. Will has spent his life pushing people away before they can hurt him, and it looks like he's going to do it all over again.
- Meanwhile, Will blows off all the meetings that Professor Lambeau has set for him with businesses and organizations that want to hire Will.
- In an epic scene, Will tells Lambeau to get lost and that all of his dumb math problems are really easy. Lambeau closes the scene by saying he wishes he'd never met Will.
- Back in therapy, Sean Maguire tells Will about how he (Maguire) would never trade away one second of the time he spent with his wife before she died.
- He also reminds Will that he'll never be able to move forward with his life by avoiding things that might hurt him.
- In the end, Will breaks down and cries when Sean tells him that he's not responsible for the abuse he faced as a child.
- After his breakthrough with Maguire, Will agrees to take one of the jobs that Professor Lambeau set up for him.
- At the last second, though, he hops in his new car and takes off for California to be with Skylar. And that's where his story ends.