Choking on Marlon Brando by Antonia Quirke

Author:Antonia Quirke [QUIRKE, ANTONIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO026000, PER004000
ISBN: 9781468303896
Publisher: ABRAMS (Ignition)
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

10

Oh, oh, oh, oh! Matt Damon! What’s the consensus on Matt Damon? What do you think? Because I reckon that of all the lunk-headed, wooden, gym-bulked, Westpoint cadet-faced, inexpressive hunks of Yankee multiplex tedium, he takes the biscuit, just kidding! The kid is it. I bloody love Matt Damon. There are boys and there are men – and it has nothing to do with age. Charlie Sheen will never not be a boy. Mickey Rooney died a boy. Jean-Pierre Léaud started off as a boy and stayed there. Javier Bardem has never been a boy. Harrison Ford was never a boy. Robert Vaughn is a man with a boyhoodectomy. And when someone makes the transition (which is rare – that nitwit Penn managed it, and Dennis Quaid), it’s shockingly intimate to observe. And this is Damon’s generosity to us, as he turns from boy to man: he lets us in. He’s like his face – you can’t but wonder where it’s going. Is it going to keep lengthening and become the face of a guilty, hollow man, the face of appalled self-disillusionment? Or is it going to cloud over completely and conceal all its monsters? I don’t know, and he doesn’t have a clue either, and that’s why he’s thrilling to watch.

What happens to boys is: the growing shame of self-knowledge slowly forces them closed. Damon is open like a desert flower in a rainstorm – wide open. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jude Law, two quintessential boys, are closing in front of our eyes, but Damon retains that ingenuousness which means he’ll still be responding to the world, he’ll still be making himself, in fifteen years’ time when he’s fifty. Relish how complex he might be in all the standard divorced cop, lawyer who accidentally runs someone over, punished-adulterer parts! And that’s why, as Jason Bourne, the amnesiac assassin of The Bourne Identity to whom the whole world is new and possibly not brave, he (I’m afraid there’s no other word for it) rocked. Because he was a man putting himself together in front of us, vulnerable, and uncontaminated by secrets, queasy, uneasy, but fresh. He doesn’t have the pane of glass over him that other human beings seem to come fitted with as standard. It’s the naturalness of his delivery whenever he’s called on to shout: ‘I don’t know who I am!’ It’s those nimble fingers sorting through the dead Clive Owen’s things so deftly his tempo hits you with the force of a special effect. Damon is taking his youth into manhood, too youthful to end up as one of the boys.

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