Matthew McConaughey is at his best when we can see the calculation beneath his charm. His drawl can make a character instantly companionable; Magic Mike shows how much more interesting he becomes when there is money to be made.
Fi1m perspective
In Magic Mike (2012), Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas tells his club’s audience what the law forbids, then takes care to explain what it allows. We laughed at the care he takes over the second part. He owns the club as well as hosting it, and plays the warning as another way to encourage the customers. Steven Soderbergh gives him a job to do, and McConaughey makes both the pleasure and the business of it visible. He seems to believe his own sales talk.
The early work makes any neat account of a sudden dramatic reinvention difficult. Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) established him in the supporting role of Wooderson, and A Time to Kill (1996) gave him his first lead. Yet the performance we would put beside Dallas is Buddy Deeds in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996). Chris Cooper provides the patient centre, and McConaughey makes Buddy distinct without drawing the film away from the other people Sayles wants us to notice. The writing sometimes joins their lives up too neatly, but the ensemble gives those connections weight.
The romantic comedies of the 2000s narrowed the parts on offer, before a roughly two-year spell turning down offers around 2009–2011. He returned to dramatic roles, with Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and the first series of True Detective (2014) helping to establish that change. We would be wary of treating the earlier actor as someone he had to discard; Dallas depends on the ease that made him useful in lighter parts. The risk, suggested by The Beach Bum (2019), is that a role simply asks him to exaggerate a familiar personality.
Soderbergh gets the balance right in Magic Mike by keeping Dallas at work. Coaching Adam before a mirror, he attends to the hips before the face; McConaughey makes the man’s practical expertise funny without treating him as a fool. The film itself becomes less persuasive when its brisk, kindly first hour gives way to a familiar plot. Dallas is still worth spending an evening with. Start there, with company; the numbers lose something without a crowd.
Biography
Matthew McConaughey is an American actor. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in radio-television-film. His breakthrough came with a supporting role in the comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). He went on to appear in A Time to Kill (1996), Contact (1997) and U-571 (2000).
In the 2000s McConaughey starred in romantic comedies such as The Wedding Planner (2001) and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003). He played Dallas in Magic Mike (2012). His performance as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also appeared in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and starred as Rust Cohle in the first season of the television series True Detective (2014).
