Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s

1 - Wonder Boys—Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, and Robert Downey Jr.

12 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 1 Wonder Boys Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, and Robert Downey Jr. DOMINIC LENNARD In the decade from 2000 to 2010, cinemagoers witnessed the ascension to superstardom of Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, and Robert Downey Jr. All three are intense, to varying degrees; disarmingly handsome , to differing effects; and talented, in various modes and rhythms. Additionally, in many of their best and most memorable roles all three pulse with an energy scarcely held in check—poised for action (or violence)—at Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, and Robert Downey Jr. the same time as they are tethered by a tremulous, childlike vulnerability. In films like The Bourne Identity (2002), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Finding Neverland (2004), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Departed (2006), Iron Man (2008), Invictus (2009), The Informant! (2009), and beyond, we see riptides of contradiction, men who have learned everything and nothing, grown up quickly and not at all. The characters brought to life by these actors are often both superheroes and lost boys, thrill-seeking loners, selfhating egotists struggling, comically, torturously, and poignantly (and in the often unlikely context of sports films, crime thrillers, blockbusters, swashbucklers , and offbeat comedies) with the people they may or may not be. Throughout the decade, all three played men surveying their foundations, sometimes shifting monoliths of self, and, charmingly (as with Downey Jr.’s loudmouth billionaire Tony Stark in Iron Man), finding more solid ground than they expected. Or, alternatively (as with Damon’s cockily corrupt Boston cop Colin Sullivan in The Departed), finding much, much less. ★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ Matt Damon Matt Damon radiates a familiar, easygoing kind of charm, a brand of stardom both warm and comfortably recognizable. Todd McCarthy of Variety supposes him “the most inescapably American-looking of all contempo actors” (“The Bourne Identity,” 7 June 2002). He keeps one eyebrow frequently hoisted in a characteristic that, in his film roles, variously conveys suspicion, unembarrassed skepticism, or good-humored self-effacement: an asymmetrical indication of nothing to hide—something imperfectly, endearingly human. “He has fashioned that oxymoronic quality, the normal superstar , to a fine art,” writes Ian Nathan of Empire (www. empireonline. com). Damon’s seductively unaffected appearance and manner are regularly played upon in his film roles: celebrated in jokey crime comedies like Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), or portrayed as dangerously misleading, as in crime thrillers like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and The Departed. The Sunday Times’s David Denby points out that Damon “is unique among Hollywood A-list stars for the quality and consistency of his lies. His greatest roles are treacherous façades. His outstanding performances in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Martin Scorsese’s Oscarwinning The Departed are obsessed with identity” (“The Bourne Ultimatum,” 16 August 2007). Whether personable, duplicitous, or both, Damon’s roles are also frequently underpinned by the vulnerability of the little boy; his characters are usually socially or physically powerful at the same time as they are emotionally precious, in need of some quasi-parental guidance. WONDER BOYS 13 At the start of Doug Liman’s 2002 film The Bourne Identity, the first in a series of three break-neck spy thrillers based on the novels by Robert Ludlum , an unconscious man floats on the ocean surface, seemingly encapsulated in a galactic blue gloom, both stormy and amniotically still. This is Jason Bourne (although he doesn’t know it yet): CIA lone-wolf assassin, and Matt Damon’s most familiar role to filmgoers in this decade. The target of an assassination attempt that left him with amnesia severe enough to erode even knowledge of his own identity, Bourne’s character is ironically forged through the Agency’s attempt to erase him. In his earlier major film roles Damon had typically been an awkward physical presence: a wan tortured genius in Good Will Hunting (1997) concealing physical signs of childhood abuse, and a master impersonator struggling to manage his homosexual desire in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Bourne franchise signaled the transformation of Damon into the tough guy. In relation to Damon’s first outing as Bourne, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post wrote, “You wouldn’t think of Damon as a tough guy, but he’s worked really hard on the physical stuff here and it shows” (103). However, in her review of 2010’s Green Zone, Kate Muir of the Sunday Times referred to Damon giving...