MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY
CINERAMA
CHARACTERS DEPENDENT ON THE STORYTELLING ABILITY OF THE ACTOR
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
An enigmatic storyteller can carry the narrative when compelled forward by a thoughtful script.
Matthew McConaughey relies on the eccentricity of the character to create a visual field while delivering dialogue and the details of the scenes with a genuine heartfelt acting art.
The repertoire of eccentric characters in important roles includes that of a father to a son, a defender to a victim of racial hatred, and a heroic space explorer to a dying Earth.
In A Time to Kill (1996) a young lawyer struggles to establish his career after his mentor retires and gifts him a bankrupt law firm in Clanton, Mississippi.
With few client prospects, the legal ideologue encounters a winner take all case defending a confessed killer with a justifiable homicide defense.
McConaughey creates a character who never seems to faulter even when the trying circumstances suggest otherwise should occur.
Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson and Oliver Platt costar in this gripping story of civil rights abuse and the legal obstacles to justice.
Like many of the characters McConaughey will create for the screen, Jake Tyler is definitely on a journey of some sort, despite his inescapable confidence and hard work, the moral dilemma has him spinning. McConaughey crafts that certainty of conviction to minimize the existential dilemmas that might be realized otherwise.
In the Dallas Buyer’s Club (2013) McConaughey plays a real life AIDS patient. With no official remedy available yet, Ron Woodroof begins to market an unproven medical cocktail.
McConaughey undergoes a physical transformation on the way to winning an Oscar for the leading role as the character subtly shifts from despair to determination and back again.
Just a few years later, McConaughey plays biopic gold prospector Kenny Wells in Gold (2016). Edgar Ramirez costars as the two characters gamble money, life and limb in the jungles of Indonesia in search of fortunes.
Wells is also imbued with that necessary confidence for that entrepreneurial spirit especially when everything else has failed.
All three characters so far are storytellers, one more so a hustler than a genuine article, and another a bit more of a profiteer than a benevolent advocate.
In the Wolf of Wallstreet (2013) that character only gets a supporting role but the time on screen shows Wall Street broker Mark Hanna as a bit of a fanatic, more prone to carney ticks involving drugs, alcohol and sex as part of a self-preservation mantra, than selling genuine value for your 401K.
That same fanatic is just the right character to take a space voyage into deep space to save the Earth only to discover the real mission back home in Interstellar (2014).
This Christopher Nolan film involving the complexity of time and the mysteries of the universe is just the right narrative for the astronaut sent out of the Galaxy to find a new home for an Earth colony, while using his storytelling techniques to explain each step of the journey to the audience.
McConaughey does not change much from film to film, but the original screen character holds all the cards as the director spins the camera around the narrative and the back story.
In the Free State of Jones (2016) the journey the character must take becomes even more complicated, involving a more intense moral dilemma as Newton Knight takes on the world to help his people without so much the incentive of self-interest.
The character maybe more frantic to succeed sometimes than in certain other films, but he remains just as convinced that he will have a successful outcome. Whether he does or not, is what often drives the film after the audience begins to stick with the enigmatic persona as he explains away the world from scene to scene unlike anyone before him.
