I'll admit; "With Honors" grew on me. Initially, I was cool towards it as it looked like some pretentious drivel, but as the movie progressed it grew on me.
The movie begins with Montgomery "Monty" Kessler (Brendan Frasier) dropping his thesis into a grate where it fell down into the boiler room of a library. By the time he hobbled down there to retrieve it a homeless man named Simon B. Wilder (Joe Pesci) was burning some pages to keep a fire going. When Monty tried to stop him, he attacked him with a metal pipe.
Right then and there I had a problem with the movie. A.) why would he grab what clearly looked like important documents and start burning them? B.) who puts paper in a boiler furnace to keep the fire stoked? C.) what was his deal attacking a student of the university he was squatting in?
This thesis was of the utmost importance to Monty because it was going to allow him to graduate with honors--hence the title. Simon, however, kept the remainder of the thesis hostage from Monty, whom he derisively called "Harvard," as a means of getting certain benefits from Monty (food, shelter, and other perks). All the while Simon is keeping the thesis hostage and only handing over a page per perk, he is carrying this air of moral superiority and prejudging Monty because he assumed Monty had prejudged him (the best defense is a good offense approach). Simon kept up this demeaning holier-than-thou charade long enough to where I was thinking, "This movie better correct itself soon because they're making this into a rich v. poor thing where the poor guy is inherently morally better because of his poverty."
Simon struck me as a cross between Robin Williams' character in "The Fisher King," and Ethan Hawke's character in "Reality Bites." Like Williams in "The Fisher King," Pesci was a short, pudgy, bearded homeless man with above average intelligence. Like Hawke in "Reality Bites," Pesci was almost misanthropic, totally demeaning, and arrogant with his sense of superiority because he isn't a slave to capitalism.
So, I was down on Simon and the entire movie to begin with. Then, just as the relationship between Simon and Monty grew, so did my enjoyment of the movie. It developed into a wonderful human-interest story with a side helping of a tolerable romance between Monty and his roommate Courtney Bloomenthal (Moira Kelly). I say tolerable romance because it wasn't too thick.
I liked "With Honors" as a complete project and I'm glad I gave it a chance.
