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Matt Damon’s 12 Best Performances

Margaret

9. “Margaret” (2011)
If all had gone to plan, Kenneth Lonergan‘s superb “Margaret” would have been released the same year as threequels “Ocean’s Thirteen” and “The Bourne Ultimatum,” making 2007 a neat microcosm of Damon’s varied talents. But it didn’t shake out that way, and when “Margaret” finally slunk out four years later, it vanished. It’s an enormous shame for everyone concerned, particularly Lonergan and extraordinary main star Anna Paquin, but also for Damon. As Aaron, the math teacher on whom the keenly outspoken Lisa (Paquin) develops a crush, he’s hardly the focus of the picture, but his role is no less complex for being a supporting turn. Akin to the subversion of his persona he achieved in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” there is an element of conflict here —however much Lisa’s behavior is at fault, Aaron essentially abuses his position and exploits her precociousness. But somehow it doesn’t make us think of Aaron as a monster, or even a closet pervert: Damon’s everyman quality makes a much wider statement about the shameful acts that a facade of respectability might hide, even from the people themselves. In this subtle performance, there is a much more unsettling idea than “bad people might lurk amongst regular people.” It’s that there may not actually be such a thing as “regular.”

good-will-hunting

8. “Good Will Hunting” (1997)
There’s really no way that “Good Will Hunting” should have worked. A spec script written by two handsome rising actors about a blue-collar Boston kid working as a janitor at M.I.T. who happens to be a secret genius (and who, in the original script, is targeted by the FBI). It sounds like a ludicrous wish-fulfillment vanity project, and maybe in some hands it might have been, but somehow “Good Will Hunting” turned out to be a genuinely affecting little film that became a surprise smash (and won Damon and his co-writer Ben Affleck Oscars for Best Original Screenplay). The writing has a deep-set humanity that transcends the sillier moments, and director Gus Van Sant keeps it nicely grounded, but it’s the performances that make it fly, Damon (and Robin Williams) in particular. Will could be a sort of Mary Sue figure, but Damon makes him both realistically prickly and pleasingly vulnerable, a kid who might have more education than most people could ever dream of, but remains a scared little boy inside. The film would be a nightmare if you didn’t care about its title character, and in Damon’s hands, you would never dream of not rooting for him.

true-grit

7. “True Grit” (2010)
It’s not the showiest or even the most nuanced character in the Coen Brothers’ hugely enjoyable “True Grit” remake, but Damon’s dickish Texas Ranger LeBoeuf still manages to be an indelible oddball. Between his typically Texan self-aggrandizing, the marble-mouthed cadence that he adopts after he’s partially bitten off his tongue, and his combination of heroic tendencies and borderline cowardice, Damon makes the role totally unforgettable, and he cannily steals the film away even from lead Jeff Bridges. He’s at once a total buffoon (there’s something brave about an actor who lets himself be so comprehensively outsmarted by a girl a third his age) and a thoroughly decent man. And that’s a combination that feels very Coen-ish, as well as a shame that he hasn’t yet reunited with the Brothers since (though he’ll at least be working from one of their scripts by year’s end, in George Clooney’s Coen-penned noir “Suburbicon”). Hilariously, Damon also confessed that his performance was essentially an impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones, the man currently hunting him in “Jason Bourne.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. when I saw this headline, Ripley was the first film to strike as having a really great Damon performance, and #1 it is!

    Carol in 30 Rock, he was so good! At least there’s Kimmy Schmidt on netflix

  2. True Grit, all the way. By far the most idiosyncratic Damon perf, followed by The Informant! He has really evolved as an actor and is one of those performers you can honestly say has never given a bad performance.

  3. I don’t understand a lot of the weird comments in this article. It’s like you guys are conveniently ignoring facts to make points that aren’t really true. And some sentences literally make no sense at all (like the one from my earlier comment). Did no one edit this piece? Fact-check it? Or even proof-read it?

    “’Rounders’ was mostly ignored on its debut….” Yet it “to some degree helped to spark the revival of [poker] in the larger culture”?

    What larger culture, the one made up of people who ignored it? This seems unlikely.

    “…his only hits since ‘Good Will Hunting’ had been supporting roles: ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘Oceans 11.”

    What about your #1 choice, released in 1999? It did quite well, making back three times its budget. And Dogma, while on a smaller scale, made back three times its budget as well.

    “Until these films came along, only a handful of Kevin Smith cameos had seen Damon display his comic chops….”

    I don’t think Damon’s hilarious performance in Dogma could possibly be called a “cameo.” I mean not even the tiniest little bit.

    “…the brilliance of the film is in the way that it keeps his motivations at length to begin with….”

    Huh?

    And I notice that no mention was made of the controversy of The Great Wall and the fact that it will also be released soon. Was this article a subtle reminder that we should like Matt Damon and not hold him responsible for it? (For the record, I do like Matt Damon, although I’m still not going to watch We Bought a Zoo.)

    I really like this website and enjoy these pieces (I’m a big fan of the 50 Foreign Films and the Woody Allen ranking was great too), but this one just felt lazy. Especially at the end, with: “But to even glance at his IMDB page is to realize we could have made this list much longer,” followed by a few half-hearted examples. Face it, other than Dogma and Ryan you listed every movie of his worth seeing in your article. I mean, I’m sure he was good in We Bought a Zoo, too. Still….

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