When we hear about Matt Damon these days, it’s oftentimes because he’s made another embarrassing PR flap. (Just to run through the hits from the past decade: mansplaining diversity to a Black female producer, asking who will think about the good men during #MeToo, bizarrely admitting he needed his daughter to tell him using the F-slur is not acceptable.)
It’s a shame he’s not being better media trained because he has genuinely great insights about the industry and his role within it. Take, for example, this lucid explanation of why movies aren’t like they used to be in 100 seconds while downing spicy wings on Hot Ones:
The thoughtlessness of his controversial remarks obscures the thoughtfulness of his career choices. Like Tom Hanks, whose past decade of subtle swerves I chronicled for /Film in 2021, Matt Damon is quickly becoming an actor whose greatness we take for granted — so much so that we don’t examine the ways he’s doing a variation on his star image. If Hanks is our Jimmy Stewart, Damon may well be our Cary Grant. He’s charming and can have a good time, though he’s mostly (self-)serious … and the characters around him can often have a good laugh by deflating his ego.
Or, at least, we tend to recognize Damon most when he represents this less complicated, aspirational figure. His three Oscar nominations for acting speak to the kinds of roles that resonate: the genius janitor in Good Will Hunting, the upright rugby captain in Invictus, and the resourceful space survivor in The Martian (available to rent). The latter, coming in 2015 as he entered middle age, revived his career by reminding audiences just how much they loved the million-watt smile of one of our great performers. Especially given that so much of the film’s success depended on his ability to hold the screen with no one else around, The Martian is the truest of testaments to his star power.
But rather than cash in on his newly revitalized bankability, Damon decided to branch out. The roles he took in the wake of The Martian speak to an actor’s desire not to cozily reside in his comfort zone. He took the opportunity to get weirder, wilder, and way less sympathetic. In Air, Damon’s latest role, he fascinatingly has it both ways. Here’s a Damon protagonist who is fiercely idealistic and committed to achieving success … and yet must overcome overwhelming ridicule and doubt to reach his goal. To understand why this feels like such a culmination for the actor, it’s worth diving into his recent roles and how he’s complicating his on-screen persona.
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