About 28 years ago, the face of modern cinema remained resolutely unchanged by the release of “Mystic Pizza.” But as well as showcasing Julia Roberts’ megawatt smile, the pizza-parlor-based romantic dramedy additionally featured Matt Damon‘s first role, and so it deserves some sort of blue plaque erected in that Connecticut town. Spin forward nearly three decades, and this week sees Damon teaming up for the fourth time with director Paul Greengrass in his fourth outing as Jason Bourne in… well, apparently “you know his name” (our review is here).
In the intervening years, Damon somehow evolved into not just one of the biggest but also one of the most interesting movie stars in America. This grand claim is earned partially because, unlike comparable stars of similar age and bankability, Damon’s self-effacing persona, his uncontroversial personal life and the certain variety of heartland appeal that can seem almost bland at times, means his is an unshowy sort of celebrity. Yet while noisier, brasher types have gone supernova and flamed out, Damon has unassumingly built a near-unrivaled catalogue of work — he usually appears in multiple films per year and displays an endearing and rewarding loyalty to many of his regular collaborators.
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But it hasn’t been a straight line: after an Oscar win as co-writer of “Good Will Hunting,” Damon made a serious of unfortunate choices, and his career was somewhat on the ropes. But “The Bourne Identity” turned things around, and ever since then, Damon’s had the enough commercial clout to pick interesting roles and work with great directors —Steven Soderbergh, Terry Gilliam, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese among them. And as well as “Jason Bourne,” he’ll hit arthouses before the year is out with the much lauded “Manchester By The Sea” which sees him reunite with “Margaret” director Kenneth Lonergan. So there’s better time to look back at Damon’s long and very productive career to date and to pick out our dozen favorite performances.
12. “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) & sequels
He’s now a well-established star settling happily into middle age, but it hasn’t been that long since Damon could play the young upstart newcomer in a cast that included George Clooney and Brad Pitt. You might think associate the other stars a little more in Steven Soderbergh’s trilogy of glamorous heist pics, but Damon’s a reliably enjoyably comic foil across the three films. A youthful pickpocket with a famous con artist dad, Damon’s Linus Caldwell (a role originally intended for Mark Wahlberg, who took “Planet Of The Apes” instead) is the rookie of the group, and much of the appeal comes from Pitt and Clooney’s characters putting him through the wringer and making him seem as awkward as possible as he attempts to prove his worth. He takes a more central presence in later films (memorably seducing Ellen Barkin with a fake nose worthy of “The Hours”), but remains semi-hapless throughout to reliably enjoyable effect. Until these films came along, only a handful of Kevin Smith cameos had seen Damon display his comic chops, but Soderbergh really deploys them beautifully, casting the actor both in and outside of type and milking him for everything he’s worth here.
11. “Rounders” (1998)
Damon’s first lead following the success of “Good Will Hunting,” “Rounders” was mostly ignored on its debut, but has evolved into a cult hit over the years. The actor plays Mike, a poker whiz who’s promised his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) that he’ll give the game up and focus on his law school studies. But when his no-good best pal Worm (Edward Norton) is released from prison, he’s dragged back into gambling to save his pal from the sinister Russian mobster Teddy KGB (a ludicrously, enjoyably over-the-top John Malkovich), the same man who ended Mike’s career years earlier. While it’s beloved most by poker fans (it’s probably the best depiction of the game to date in cinema, and to some degree helped to spark the revival of the game in the larger culture), the film in general is firmly entertaining —director John Dahl invests a terrific noirish tinge to the film, the script by “Billions” creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien is zingy, and most of the performances —Norton and John Turturro in particular— are excellent. It’s perhaps not Damon’s most distinctive performance —it’s to some degree Will Hunting with a gambing fixation— but he’s nevertheless an engaging and likable lead, and his chemistry with Norton is great.
10. “Courage Under Fire” (1996)
We tend to think of Damon’s career as kicking off with “Good Will Hunting,” but he’s had prominent roles in movies a full six years before that, including “School Ties” and “Geronimo: An American Legend.” In particular, he turned heads with a terrific performance in Ed Zwick’s “Courage Under Fire” two years before his Oscar-winning breakthrough hit big. The military thriller, which sees Denzel Washington’s haunted soldier investigating if Meg Ryan’s late Gulf War soldier should be the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor, is one of Zwick’s more palatable films, a thriller first and polemic second, but it’s still kind of forgettable —at least until Damon turns up, anyway. His Specialist Ilario, the medic of Ryan’s Gulf War unit, is a relatively brief appearance and basically an exposition-delivery device who eventually spills the beans. But he shines in it, having lost 40 pounds for the role, an early demonstration of the absolute commitment he’d give to subsequent performances, his body a demonstration of the upset and regret that’s eating Ilario up inside. From this, you can see why Damon was getting buzz even before his own script became such a big hit.
