Rebecca sent in this old review - yes, it was posted once
before, but it's worth reading again:
(Time Magazine), 12-27-1999
Matt Damon Acts Out He's popular, hardworking and sincere. So
it might surprise you how much he has in common with the lonely
misfit he plays in The Talented Mr. Ripley
He's not short. For some reason this is the first thing people
want to know when they hear you have met Matt Damon. "He's short,
right?" the inquiries come. "How tall is he?" "Is he a Pygmy or
what?" He's actually 5 ft. 11 in., but still, the fact that the
rest of us are not Matt Damon--have no Oscar, have never kissed
Winona Ryder and are not making $7 million a movie--would be no
more palatable even if we could put him in the "good-looking but
short" box with, say, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson.
It's just our puny way of kicking out at an industry that
manufactures a product so completely irresistible to so many of
us: the celebrity. And in the 29-year-old Damon, the star factory
has found a mother lode of raw material: charm, good looks, an
even temperament, smarts, a relish for hard work, devotion to his
mom. But if it makes you feel any better, Matt Damon feels your
pain. He didn't used to be him either.
"There are times I've been rejected that would spin your head
around," says Damon. "You wouldn't believe I sat there and let
people say stuff like that to me." Before The Rainmaker and Good
Will Hunting--the one-two punch that threw him into the spotlight
and led to six more back-to-back roles, including his latest, in
The Talented Mr. Ripley--Damon struggled for seven years to get
enough work to feed himself. But tough as those years were, they
are eclipsed in his memory by an experience he had when he was
nine or 10. "I moved to a neighboring city, and I really wanted
to go back to my old school and see my friends," says Damon. "And
my mother came up with this idea: 'Well, why don't you go back
and spend a day there?'" But when she called and asked whether
her son could return to say goodbye and achieve some closure, the
principal said no. "I couldn't understand it," says Damon, his
indignation still palpable. "The feeling of rejection was so
deep." His mother, a professor of early-childhood education,
wrote a stinging letter to the principal, which the young Damon
carried around for weeks. "I remember thinking, 'Someday this
person will be in a position of needing something from me,'" he
says.
So although it might seem that if one were making a movie about a
charismatic, handsome, wealthy young man and the lonely misfit
who desperately wants to be him, one would cast Damon in the
glamour boy's role, he says he identifies with the dork. "I
really relate to Ripley," says Damon. "I always did. I think most
people will." And while there are differences--Damon says he
played Ripley as a virgin, which, given his dating history
(Claire Danes and Minnie Driver are two of the famous ones), must
have been a stretch--there are also similarities. Damon and Ripley
are both from the Boston area. Both are eager to please, polite
and attentive to whomever they're with. Both work incredibly hard
on the project at hand. For Ripley, Damon spent a month learning
to play the piano and perfected Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring on
the harmonium for a scene he knew would be cut from the movie.
"I'm a writer. I knew what would be the first to go," says Damon,
who won his Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Ben
Affleck. "But it wasn't a waste of time, because playing the
piano informed the way Ripley walked and the way he sat."
Besides, he says, flashing his extra-wide grin, "now I can play
Bach and Chopsticks and nothing in between."
After Ripley, for which he lost 25 lbs. in order to appear pale
and skinny, Damon spent a month learning to ride and bulking up
for his portrayal of an 18-year-old cowboy in All the Pretty
Horses, which will be released in late 2000. When Ripley director
Anthony Minghella visited Damon on that set, he barely recognized
him. "He was like the more successful, more centered, more
handsome, just generally more masculine and surefooted cousin of
Ripley," he says. And as Damon conducted a barrage of press
interviews for Ripley, he was squirming under a brace because he
had separated a rib while swinging a golf club for yet another
role, as a World War I veteran who finds enlightenment through
his caddy in The Legend of Bagger Vance, which is being directed
by Robert Redford. "Matt seems to work on a process of 'If it
doesn't hurt, it can't be right,'" says Minghella. Damon shrugs
off the compliment. "I just don't think there's an excuse for not
working as hard as you can," he says.
Ironically, the star and the guilt-ridden murderer have something
else in common. Both Ripley and Damon work their way through
conversations like poachers in Yellowstone. They sense they're
being watched, so they constantly observe themselves. Halfway
through talking about the responsibilities of fame and how it
should be used for good, Damon breaks off. "Oh God," he says. "I
sound like Miss America." He seems to have an acute sense of what
others, particularly reporters, want to hear. He talks sports
with the guys. He does classic movie routines with the show-biz
old-timers. To a thirtysomething female, he talks mostly about
his mother.
The glaring difference between Ripley and Damon is that Damon has
managed to pull off what Ripley doesn't: he has achieved the
trappings of privilege and success, but not, it seems, at the
expense of his soul. Partly this is thanks to the support of his
friends, most famously his childhood buddy Affleck, with whom he
has been so closely entwined in the public eye that they now try
to avoid speaking about each other to the press. ("It's not like
we're bitching ex-husbands, or anything," Damon says.) More
important, it's thanks to his family. They're quite a clan:
liberal, intellectual, active in social causes, politically
sophisticated. "They're the most fun, most interesting people,"
says Skylar Ulrich, the former girlfriend who was the model for
the role Minnie Driver played in Good Will Hunting, and who's now
a doctor, married to Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. "They're
really tight knit, and yet they're very individual."
Damon is close to both his father Kent Damon, a retired
stockbroker whose marriage to Matt's mother ended when Matt was
two, and his older brother Kyle, 32, a sculptor. But it's his
mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, who seems to have had the most
influence. When colleagues at Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass.,
asked Carlsson-Paige for her son's autograph for their daughters,
she instead invited the daughters to a discussion group. She
showed them pictures of Matt at their age and explained that he
was just a regular person, like them. She acknowledges, however,
that in one way her son is different. "It's unusual for children
to become interested in something really young and then stay with
it their whole lives," says Carlsson-Paige, who encouraged her
son as she watched him use her hats, tablecloths, necklaces and
gloves to make himself into characters from the time he was two.
"But that's Matthew. He came to me when he was eight and said, 'I
know what I want to be when I grow up.' And I said, 'What's that,
honey?,' knowing exactly what he would say. And when he said, 'An
actor,' I said, 'That's nice. Now go out and play.'" And in some
ways, that's exactly what he still does.
The things that make the real-life Damon a star--his agreeable
features, easy smile and whelpish energy--keep the audience glued
to his side in The Talented Mr. Ripley despite the repulsive acts
his character commits. His apple-pie qualities are essential to
the moral disquiet Minghella strives to create in the audience.
But they don't necessarily make Damon a good actor. If Damon has
a demon, it is that he thinks the jury is still out on whether he
can act. "Gwyneth [Paltrow] can walk into a scene and be talking
about something else, and they say 'Action!' and she turns into
the person she's playing," says Damon of his Ripley co-star. "My
life would be a lot easier if I could do that." But those who
have directed him demur. "He's way stronger than he thinks he
is," says Billy Bob Thornton, who worked with him on All the
Pretty Horses. Notes Minghella of Damon's work in Ripley: "It's
not a display performance. But the journey that he makes in the
film is extraordinary. It's so carefully drawn." And both of them
use the exact same phrase: "He just gets it."
He seems to get the fame thing too. When the school that rejected
Damon 20 years ago wrote recently asking for a photograph for its
75th-anniversary wall display, Damon and his mother talked it
over for a while. What he had predicted had come to pass.
"Karmically, it was big," says Damon. A pause. "Of course I'll
send them something." Of course.
--With reporting by Georgia Harbison
MATT'S MULTIPLE MOVIE IDENTITIES
SCHOOL TIES Damon played against type as an anti-Semitic bully
who targets the new kid in school, Brendan Fraser
COURAGE UNDER FIRE The small role of a guilt-stricken junkie
soldier investigated by Denzel Washington was his breakthrough
GOOD WILL HUNTING In the film that changed it all, Damon played a
genius with a troubled soul, and Robin Williams was his therapist
ROUNDERS As a reformed gambler drawn back into the world of
high-stakes poker, he displayed the anguish of a good guy with a
bad habit
THE RAINMAKER His first starring role, as a greenhorn lawyer
mentored by Danny DeVito, traded on his natural aura of integrity
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN He was appealingly forthright as the title
character and held his own alongside Tom Hanks, left, and Ed
Burns
DOGMA Reteaming with buddy Ben Affleck, he explored his comic
side, as an angel trying to get back to heaven via New Jersey