What a difference a few years can make, eh? Prior to 2011, Matthew McConaughey’s name would usually have been quickly followed or immediately preceded by words like “shirtless,” “dire rom-com,” “nude bongo-playing” or “paycheck gig,” but here he is in 2014 heading up one of the year’s most massive movies with “Interstellar,” and doing so as the Academy’s reigning Best Actor. In fact, McConaughey’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of integrity has been so remarkable he’s gifted hacky scribes like us not just with the phrase “McConaissance,” but a lexicographical template for similar phenomena in the future. So far we’ve had the (Michael) Keatonaissance, the Reesurgence (Witherspoon), while we’re pulling for the (Jake) Gyllenaissance and the (Scarlett) Johannaissance to get their official recognition as well. Sorry to all the actors out there swimming upstream whose names don’t lend themselves to -naissance-ization, but really, you should have thought of that.
There’s a handy caesura in McConaughey’s career that marks the end of the “arrested for playing percussion while being naked and high” period and the beginning of the “award-winning, respected, versatile leading man” bit. The last film of the doldrums was 2009’s “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” which was so much old rope to McConaughey; one of those films in which the most taxing plot development is how screenwriters were going to find an excuse to have him take his shirt off (can’t remember how they managed it seeing as he’s not a surfer or a submariner therein and it’s set in winter, but pretty sure they do). Then there’s a couple years’ pause, during which time McConaughey settled down, got married and started a family. And come 2011, he’s back on screens, fully clothed throughout the runtime of Brad Furman’s absurd but entertaining “The Lincoln Lawyer.” It’s a small, sleaze-edged film in which every character is some kind of second-rate hustler, but McConaughey is just terrific, and following it up with Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” and William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe” sure didn’t hurt.
Since then it’s been a steady ascent and McConaughey hasn’t put a foot wrong (even his misfire from this period, Lee Daniels’ ludicrous “The Paperboy,” is a catastrophically interesting misfire). From sending up his man-meat reputation fondly in Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike” to embodying the bayou wildman in Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” to losing all that weight and gaining all that silverware for “The Dallas Buyers Club,” to even carving out a showy little cameo for himself in Scorsese’s brashest film to date “The Wolf of Wall Street,” McConaughey’s film catalogue since 2011 has been little short of mouthwatering. And that’s before we even talk about his revelatory turn in the peerless “True Detective,” a role which, more than any one of those single films above, cemented his newly re-established credibility as an actor of genuine grit and commitment.
After all that, he could be forgiven, especially in something as star-heavy and visual effects-laden as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” for doing a little phoning in. But perhaps the biggest surprise of that film is that McConaughey finds room within its excesses to add some actorly fireworks, gifting it with one of its most affecting scenes. It’s a salutory reminder of how much he can bring to a film when engaged, as he has been for the last few years without fail. But even prior to that it wasn’t all turgid beachside adventures (though there were far too many of those), so we thought we’d take a look into that half-remembered past and dig out Matthew McConaughey’s 5 best pre-McConaissance titles. Alright, alright, alright.
“Dazed and Confused” (1993)
There are two 2014 movies that deal primarily with the passage of time, albeit in radically, galactically different ways: Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.” But the star of one worked with the director of the other over twenty years ago in an epochal movie about a rite of passage, “Dazed and Confused.” Not only did this ’70s music-soaked, pot-stained coming of age tale launch McConaughey’s career (and his “alright, alright, alright” catchphrase), it also for better or worse defined a certain part of his laid-back slacker appeal. Appearing here alongside other future stars Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg and Parker Posey, among many others, McConaughey’s David Wooderson is an endearing character, partly because there’s an almost tragic edge to his hedonism. He’s the guy who’s already graduated, hanging round school on the last day to get high, score chicks and desperately, for one more day, stave off any encroaching future responsibility, and it’s McConaughey’s charm that stops Wooderson being an all-out sleaze. Maybe the best ever evocation of that brief fleeting moment when you get to play with grown-up toys like drugs and sex without any real sense of the grown-up consequences, Wooderson is the fly trapped in amber here. Linklater’s next film will be spiritual sequel “That’s What I’m Talking About,” which will no doubt continue the preoccupation of the ‘Before’ trilogy and “Boyhood” with time. But that thematic concern started all the way back with “Dazed and Confused,” and specifically with McConaughey’s character. After all, even in “Interstellar” you don’t get anything as succinct a summations of fundamental time paradoxes as, “that’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
“A Time To Kill” (1996)
In order to have a career rebirth, you have to have a prior period of success. For McConaughey, that period was probably the mid-to-late ’90s and was largely ushered in (for a wider audience anyway) by his lead role in this starry, glossy, polemical John Grisham adaptation from director Joel Schumacher. As subtle as a sledgehammer yet undeniably effective, not to mention enraging, it’s a potboilery legal drama with McConaughey as a crusading white Southern lawyer defending a father, played by Samuel L Jackson, on a murder charge, the kicker being that he murdered the two white supremacists who raped his ten-year-old daughter and left her for dead. With the moral issues painted in a big red letters (usually K, K and K) and burning crosses across the movie, there’s not a whole lot of room for nuance, but McConaughey is admirably restrained and decent (even turning down Sandra Bullock’s advances) playing a man pushed to the limits of his convictions, endangering his own family and standing within the community for an ideal. And it’s a film packed with showy cameos, from Kiefer Sutherland as a violent KKK asshole, to his dad Donald as a drunken genteel lawyer who rallies to the side of good, to Chris Cooper who possibly steals the movie with an impassioned plea from the stand to free the defendant, to Kevin Spacey, Charles S Dutton, Ashley Judd, Brenda Fricker and a surprising good-guy role for Oliver Platt. But McConaughey proved he could hold his own against so much heavyweight grandstanding, and he did it with a kind of understated charisma and intelligence, not to mention absurd good looks, that had people hailing him as the next Paul Newman.