Matt Damon’s 12 Best Performances

6. “The Departed” (2006)
While far from Scorsese’s best work, “The Departed” remains a well-crafted, hugely enjoyable pulp crime flick, and which certainly improves on its subject matter, the Hong Kong film “Infernal Affairs.” The film’s chock-full of pleasures, and Damon’s performance, while not the most immediate in the film, is probably the one that lingers longest afterwards. To all appearances the same kind of all-American boy that Damon’s made a specialty of, Colin Sullivan is in fact a spineless piece of shit, whose soul has rusted and corroded away over the years that he’s been serving Jack Nicholson’s mob boss in secret while rising through the police ranks. It’s one of the few times that Damon’s played a villain, but as we see both here and with another pick higher up, he really shines when he lets his facade slip into something more corrupted, and Colin’s self-loathing and turmoil that comes from living a false life is a thing of beauty. The elevator scene at the end, in which Damon switches on a dime from self-righteous bravado to pathetically pleading to be put out of his misery by his captor, is some of the best work that Damon’s ever done. It’s a deceptively complex performance, and probably the best in the film.

5. “The Bourne Identity” (2002) / “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) / “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007)
Damon’s career was, if not quite floundering, then at least spinning its wheels when “The Bourne Identity,” based on the Robert Ludlum spy series, landed on his desk. Coming off a series of under-performing projects (“Gerry,” “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” “All The Pretty Horses” —a film whose studio butchering he’s never gotten over — “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” etc.), his only hits since “Good Will Hunting” had been supporting roles: “Saving Private Ryan” and “Oceans 11.” But that strange mix of name-brand familiarity and second-string anonymity made him the perfect choice for special ops amnesiac Jason Bourne — that is, if he had the action chops. But in Doug Liman‘s hands first, and then for soulmate director Greengrass, he choked out any doubts on that front with a wiry, blunt-force agility that seemed to take the character, as much as the audience, by surprise. Particularly defined by Greengrass’ shaky-cam immediacy, ‘Bourne’ didn’t just bring the spy movie down from its rarefied tuxedo/martini perch, but it remade the modern action movie, while Damon quietly remade the idea of the modern action star. Searching first for answers, then for justice, then for redemption and then for sins past, his Bourne is killable and oddly relatable.

4. “The Informant!” (2009)
A film somewhat underrated in Steven Soderbergh’s canon, “The Informant!” kicked off a great run of work in the few years before the director ‘retired’ (he’s back, in case you haven’t noticed), and saw Damon gave a great, atypical performance that’s in his absolute top tier (somehow, it failed to pick him up an Oscar nomination). With a tone that comes across like Alexander Payne doing “The Insider,” writer Scott Z. Burns tells the mostly true story of Mark Whitacre, who became a corporate whistleblower to the FBI but who turned out to also be embezzling millions of dollars at the same time. Paunchy and under a mustache that ages him maybe a decade, Damon is almost unrecognizable and the brilliance of the film is in the way that it keeps his motivations at length to begin with, Soderbergh having enormous fun showing the incongruities between Whitacre’s behavior and his actions (it’s one of the great unreliable narrator movies). And Damon draws on all of his skills here: there’s a certain blandness to him to begin with, but we soon find something both desperately funny and deeply sad about him.

3. “Behind the Candelabra” (2013)
It’s incumbent to being among the most prolific actors working presently, but also of the kind of collaborator he is, that Damon has several buddy directors with whom he’s worked on multiple occasions. His Greengrass partnership has been his most commercially successful, but his most fruitfully varied has been with Soderbergh, who has used him in roles big and small, serious and comedic, on seven different occasions by now. As much as such a diverse set of roles can have an exemplar, though, it might be Damon’s turn as Scott Thorson, longtime lover of Lee Liberace, played by Michael Douglas. “Behind the Candelabra” is a HBO film in the States, but gained a deserved theatrical release elsewhere, and Damon, alongside a career-best Douglas, is wonderful, brilliantly walking the film’s precarious tonal line between comedy and tragedy. His Thorson is caught up in one of the oddest celebrity crucibles ever, seduced and ultimately abandoned by a Liberace who was himself in thrall to massive fame and to the pressures of remaining closeted (be it ever so unconvincingly, retrospectively speaking). Yet despite all the cruelties and cosmetic enhancements, the film primarily emerges as a portrait of a sincere but doomed love affair, largely due to its two perfectly pitched central performances.