From True Detective to Tropic Thunder, we examine how Matthew McConaughey has risen to be the frontrunner for this year's Oscars.
If you watched the Golden Globes last month, there’s a good chance you saw Matthew McConaughey take the prize for Best Actor in a Drama. Then maybe you got tired of all the glitzy fawning of the Hollywood Foreign Press, so you changed the channel to HBO to check out their gritty new crime thriller, True Detective. And there was McConaughey again, stealing every one of his scenes in a superbly cast, hard-boiled character study that includes Woody Harrelson and Michelle Monaghan as his co-stars. Nothing says the golden age of television more than an awards season frontrunner simultaneously chewing up Louisiana scenery like a really big storm.
It’s time to face facts. We’re at the peak of the McConaissance: the multi-media rejuvenation of the career of one of Hollywood’s most charismatic leading men.
Love him or hate him, like the programming of human consciousness itself, we must accept this next step in (career) evolution. After all, he’s likely about to win the Oscar for Dallas Buyer’s Club, be another frontrunner in September’s Emmys for True Detective, and will soon star inInterstellar, Christopher Nolan’s mysterious sci-fi epic that stands poised to dominate 2014’s holiday movie season. Not bad for a good ol’ boy from Texas whose first big screen role was the moustached high school enthusiast in Dazed and Confused. In fact, when one considers just where his career was only five years ago—somewhere between the Sarah Jessica Parker rom-com Failure to Launch and his second Kate Hudson-partnered rom-com, Fool’s Gold—it is a downright miracle. It’s the McConaughssance.
And here are the nine stages that made it possible.
Tropic Thunder
Matthew McConaughey’s first step in reminding audiences why he’s one of the best movie stars working today came from a decidedly un-movie star part. It wasn’t even originally his since two previous stars had vacated the role prior to McConaughey signing on as Rick Peck, the TiVo-loving agent of Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) in the brilliantly mean-spirited Tinseltown takedown, Tropic Thunder. Another movie star who fell on some rough times in the mid-2000s had originally agreed to do that role, but he later convinced Stiller to re-cast him as the sleazy, overweight studio mogul named Les Grossman. That actor was Tom Cruise. Longtime Stiller collaborator Owen Wilson next took on Peck, but then had to leave the picture all together after a suicide attempt. Thus, it came to McConaughey, who like Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. in that film, was allowed to satirize his movie star persona. McConaguhey’s Peck could have been written off as a minor Hollywood sycophant archetype, but instead found a uniquely laid back quality that made his fast-talking seem strangely sincere, punctuating his business calls with a gingerly Southern drawl (well that, and his competitive Wii Sports regiment). Indeed, McConaughey’s ability to imbue Peck with the faintest hint of sympathy as he struggled with betraying his best friend and owning a Gulf Stream V ultimately rewrote the ending of the picture, as Peck was originally killed off by the film’s villainous Laotian drug cartel. Instead, Stiller reshot an ending where Peck saves his friend and gets his Gulf Stream. It surely made moviegoers h-h-h-h-h-appy.
Lincoln Lawyer
McConaughey’s first leading role in recent years as a serious actor was in Lincoln Lawyer, a 2011 film that in retrospect seems like a nifty subliminal suggestion to force audiences to remember McConaughey’s heroic legalese roles from the 1990s. Whether it was as the white lawyer learning a valuable lesson about race in Joel Schumaucher’s A Time to Kill (1996) or as the white lawyer who learned another valuable lesson about race in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), McConaghey was one gallantly schooled attorney. But this 2011 legal eagle came after a decade of far more cynical studio efforts, and lawyers were back to being the subject of audiences’ least trusted professionals. Thus, McConaughey’s Mickey Haller is every bit the self-aggrandizing narcissist those previous roles implied, but without the real possibility of redemption. McConaughey is allowed to find the grays and cracks in one of his previous well-worn Hollywood images and nearly jumps off the screen with visible hunger when he devours this juicy role so thoroughly that viewers are able to ignore the sparse freshness coming from the rest of the color-in-the-lines picture. This is a star vehicle for McConaughey, one that he gleefully drives off the paved road and into the dirt that his career GPS had long avoided. It’s a blast.
Bernie
Anytime McConaughey reteams with his Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater, it is cause to be intrigued. Two Texans who came out of the Austin scene with talent and charisma to spare, they have both seen meteoric rises since that 1993 teaming, albeit for Linklater, it has been mostly on the indie circuit with the revelatory and experimental Before Sunrise trilogy and rotoscoped acid trips like Waking Life. They teamed one more time in the ‘90s with an ambitious star vehicle for McConaughey, The Newton Boys, but their real reunion came in this curiously upbeat 2011 dark comedy, Bernie. As the story of how Bernie (Jack Black), an appealing and seemingly A-sexual Good Samaritan, finally lost his patience with his church’s resident grouch (Shirley MacLaine) and ended her life, Bernie's a true crime tale of Texan justice that's most notable for how much the community accepted Bernie’s little indiscretion. He is just so darn likable, and she kind of had it coming, right? Amusingly, Linklater again casts McConaughey as the creep in the background, except this time he is the justice-minded DA Danny Buck Davidson. McConaughey is once more a lawyer on a moral crusade, so is it bad that we kind of wish he’d leave poor Bernie alone? When Jack Black can win the popularity contest for both the onscreen characters and the audience, it is obvious that both actors are bringing something special to this oddball dramedy.
Killer Joe
As of 2012, McConaughey was subverting his image as a smiling Southern bumpkin with an Ace up his sleeve, but in Killer Joe, he was allowed to burn that image to ashes, and then deep fry it again for optimum flavor. Directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection, Bug), Killer Joeis one of the most disturbingly lurid films featuring big name stars—McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Thomas Hayden Church—released in the last several decades. This picture earns its hard NC-17 rating, and McConaughey has never been better than as this toxically charming police detective who moonlights as a low-level contract killer. When Chris (Hirsch), an indebted drug dealer, figures out that the best way he can pay back loan sharks is by having his abusive mother assassinated, he ropes in his deadbeat dad (Church) and his younger sister (Juno Temple) to help him out. However, he won’t have Killer Joe’s five-figure fee until after the job is done, so Joe takes a retainer: Chris’ barely legal little sister as his sexual property. This movie uncomfortably crosses the boundaries of greed, matricide, and sex with shades of pedophilia and definite perversion permeating throughout. It is an art film reveling in bad taste; it’s uncomfortable in the way that only Friedkin can induce, but McConaughey is the most unnerving monstrosity of all, making things totally not “all right.”
Magic Mike
Up next on our list of magical Matthew McConaughey movies is Magic Mike. After nearly a decade of the “stripper with a heart of gold” subgenre—dominated by infamous efforts like Exotica (1994), Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995), and Demi Moore’s equally ill-fated Striptease (1996)—it was only a matter of time before the real ladies got a movie of their own. But who’d have thought it would be director Steven Soderbergh who finally obliged? The artistic filmmaker who likes to weave between genres and budget-sizes like a Hell’s Angel on the interstate during rush hour, there appears to be no subject matter uninteresting for the eclectic auteur, and that includes male stripping. A sleeper hit in 2012 for obvious reasons, Magic Mike attempted to explore the underbelly of seedy male erotica that’s supposedly based on star Channing Tatum’s real-life experiences. However, the true toe-tapping treat for audiences was McConaughey’s club owner and former dancer. Equal parts mentor and nefarious shade of the Ghost of Christmas Future, McConaughey acted as Bette Davis to Tatum’s Anne Baxter. As campy as it is gritty, McConaughey playing the older, grosser side of his rom-com bronze statue from only 10 years prior earned a fervent following that even petitioned for Oscar recognition from its most incredulous of devotees.
Mud
McConaughey started his game-changing 2013 in style at the Sundance Film Festival with this riverboat slice of transcendentalism. When I reviewed Mud last April, I called it a “slowly fried Southern feast of emotion and humanity cooked on the murky banks of the Mississippi,” and that holds true after multiple viewings. There is something timeless about the picture’s folksy charm, which is as much a coming-of-age story on the delta, as it is a crime drama that ends in shattering thunder when the family of a man Mud murders comes calling. But what holds it all together, besides the performance of the young protagonist played by Tye Sheridan, is a very affable and restrained turn from McConaughey as the title character. Mud is the definitive Southern storyteller: a man of tall tales and smiling agony. Young Ellis’ existential need for Mud’s love story to come true, despite its legion obstacles, is as relatable to any audience as our own compulsion to see Mud succeed. This remarkable indie remains one of the brightest spots of 2013’s big budgeted CGI-orgies, and it will motor on for many years to come.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Sometimes even the smallest hits leave the biggest marks, and Matthew McConaughey’s rhythmic chest-thumping hit so hard that it affected the entire tone of a Martin Scorsese picture. As some of the earliest sequences, shot four days into production, McConaughey’s three-scene cameo as Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) mentor into the world of Wall Street, cocaine, and chronic masturbation (jerking off “keeps the blood flowing”) is designed to leave a big impression on Belfort and the audience. However, that extended beyond the camera too. After five takes of the infamous lunch scene were finished, and Scorsese was ready to move on to the next set-up, DiCaprio asked McConaughey about his ritualistic relaxation exercise that he does before every take; his chest-thumping. Amused and intrigued, the two riffed on that energy for one of the movie’s most bizarrely hilarious moments. It even influenced the rest of the picture. Says Scorsese, “I realized that’s the movie! It has to go fast, fast, fast.” When two actors’ rapport in one scene can influence a master like Scorsese four days into shooting, something is going right.
Dallas Buyers Club
Still, McConaughey’s most transcendent 2013 moment is his award-winning role as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. As Den of Geek critic Don Kaye noted in his review, “Movies can show us corners of history that we may not have known about,” and that is exactly what this film does by exploring the less traveled avenues of the AIDS epidemic. Woodroof was given 30 days to live by his doctors when he was diagnosed with HIV, but always the stubborn cowboy, Woodroof beats the spread when he begins smuggling AZT up from Mexico. The U.S. government may abhorrently drag its heels on treating the spreading AIDS virus, but Woodroof will let any desperate person within Dallas survive—for a price. The boldness of Dallas Buyers Clubis its refusal to eulogize Woodroof as a saint or ignore his initially intense homophobic feelings about AIDS and the LGBT community that was so inflicted by it. It is a naturally coarse performance that required McConaughey to lose 50 pounds for the role, but its avalanche of ensuing accolades is truly immeasurable.
True Detective
So, at the peak of his career renaissance, McConaughey opts to do…television? At the risk of regurgitating a cliché, it’s not TV; it’s HBO. And as this is the network that is also currently producing the staggering fantasy epic Game of Thrones and the Martin Scorsese-produced gangster drama Boardwalk Empire, McConaughey appears right at home with his former EdTV co-star,Woody Harrelson (it also helps that McConaughey enjoyed some brilliant cameos on HBO’s now defunct redneck opus, Eastbound & Down). True Detective is so nihilistic that the detecting is irrelevant; it’s just a pretense to explore the broken lives of two men who have splintered in countless directions to the wind. Harrelson’s repressed “family man” is one nervous breakdown from exploding as a mass murderer himself, and McConaughey’s Rust Cohle imploded long ago. Something is very, very off when a gumbo gumshoe in the heart of Dixie is espousing, “The honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand-in-hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters, opting out of a raw deal.”
If noir is doom-ridden, then this is wholly a shade blacker than that genre, with McConaughey as its desolate black hole center. Three episodes in, each week has become a waiting game for his next soliloquy about the futility of existence, causing this to be one mystery that audiences should wish to remain unsolved. Because once the story is over, Cohle may finally walk into that goodnight and away from this stunning anthological series. Until then, I would wager between the two, Cohle is the true detective.
However, even when True Detectivecloses the book on its first case in five weeks, fans will still have plenty more to appreciate from this thriving McConaughssance. Besides his award circuit rounds that Detectivewill carry over well through the summer, McConaughey is the lead character in Christopher Nolan’s latest original film. It is safe to say that this renaissance period is about to go out of this world.
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