In the movie "About A Boy," there are many conflicts between several characters. The conflict to be analyzed in this paper is between one of the main characters, Will (played by Hugh Grant), and a secondary character, Fiona (played by Toni Collette). .
Fiona is the mother of the other main character, Marcus, a boy who is the outcast at school and is having trouble fitting in. Marcus meets Will by chance one day through a friend of his mom's. On that day they are thrown into a terrible situation when they bring Marcus home and find his mother overdosed on drugs in an attempt to commit suicide. After that event, Marcus viewed Will as a fall back person, someone he needed to keep around because he saw how unstable his mother was. He started going over to Will's house everyday after school, uninvited, just to hang out. This made Will uncomfortable because he was used to being a bachelor living by himself with no real family. Slowly a relationship and connection developed between the two and Will was in over his head.
The setting of the conflict is at a restaurant were Will is eating with a friend. Fiona (Marcus's mom) just found out about Marcus's visits to Will's apartment and the new shoes Will had purchased for him that the kids stole after school. She was furious and had to talk to Will immediately, so dragging Marcus along, she went straight to the restaurant. .
Looking at this conflict using the CRIP scheme for goals it is easy to identify both party's goals through all of their stages. Fiona had definite content goals when she planned on storming in on Will's dinner. She wanted to know what he was doing with her son after school and what his intentions were. Will of course, not knowing he was going to be confronted in a public place, had no pre-meditated content goals. That changed however as soon as he was being rudely confronted. When Fiona started to imply that he was having an inappropriate relationship with Marcus, Will soon found his content goal to be getting to the bottom of the accusations.