Stoned Fox

Yar birds: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey in Failure to Launch. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Matthew McConaughey got his first break playing an over-aged slacker in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused. He radiated a weird loser charisma as David Wooderson, a twentysomething guy who hangs around the teen party scene with his muscle car and ’70s ’stache, unable to move on from his high school glory days. “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man,” Wooderson says. “I keep getting older, they stay the same age.” It was a smart performance, affirming a “just keep livin’” cool, while simultaneously projecting a doomed knowledge of Wooderson’s dwindling future.

Fast-forward 13 years to the unfortunately titled Failure to Launch. The 36-year-old Texan plays Tripp, a successful boat salesman who still lives at home with his parents. Like Wooderson, Tripp is an aging man-boy, but now McConaughey’s edge of self-awareness has been worn away, replaced by a self-regarding vanity. The premise of this dire, depressing rom-com is that Tripp’s exasperated parents (Kathy Bates and former pro footballer Terry Bradshaw) have decided that the only way to evict their son is to hire “motivational consultant” Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to pose as his girlfriend. This will give Tripp the incentive to acquire a bedroom that isn’t right next to mommy and daddy’s.

We’re supposed to be rooting for those two crazy kids, but it’s hard to care whether they get together when Paula is a professional liar and Tripp is an unrepentant basement-boy. (Okay, technically he lives on the second floor, but you know what I mean.)  McConaughey’s Texas-sized swagger does nothing to make the role of an attenuated adolescent more palatable. Tripp likes his mom’s maid service and catering, but what he really loves is using his unevolved status to get rid of any woman who gets too serious. When a date gives him what he calls “the look,” he takes her home for a night of passion, which is inevitably interrupted by his blundering father. The result? Instant breakup.

As a relationship exit strategy, this is callous and just a bit icky. That the movie tries to pass it off as comedy suggests that McConaughey isn’t entirely to blame for the failure of Failure. Screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember unwisely make reference to the 1940 classic The Philadelphia Story (as Paula describes one of Tripp’s yachts as “yar”), but Failure to Launch couldn’t be farther from the romantic comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, which relied on high-spirited sparring between actual grown-ups. Those comedies recognized that men and women sometimes had different expectations, but believed that arriving at a compromise could be fast-talking, screwball fun. (Tripp’s idea of witty repartee is to tell Paula that her pants make her look fat. Kate Hepburn would have decked him.)

These days, romantic comedies tend to reduce love to a zero-sum game. The genre has split into estrogen-heavy stories with dreamy, wish-fulfillment boyfriends (often played by John Cusack or Taye Diggs), and raunchy guy-coms in which toxic bachelors weasel their way out of commitment until an aspartame-sweetened finish. The decline of the rom-com might reflect a coarsening of movie genres. Or maybe it mirrors the cold realities of 21st-century dating. (There’s a sobering thought.) But even in these hard-up times, it’s difficult to imagine why any self-respecting woman would consider McConaughey’s over-the-hill mama’s boy a prize.

So just how did the one-time Next Big Thing get here, playing a man who gets attacked by a chipmunk, a dolphin and a chuckwalla lizard in scenes of frantic slapstick? (A friend explains that Tripp’s life choices are so insulting to the natural order that the animal kingdom is sending him a message.)

Southern discomfort: Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock in A Time to Kill. Getty Images.

McConaughey’s problems began in 1996 when he was aggressively launched as Hollywood’s new leading man in the bombastic John Grisham adaptation A Time To Kill. As a lawyer defending an African-American man in a racially charged murder case, his performance was self-righteous and preening. And director Joel Schumacher’s tendency to shoot McConaughey like a glamour queen, with lingering close-ups of him glistening in the sultry southern heat, certainly didn’t help. Once it became clear that McConaughey wasn’t a young Paul Newman or a latter-day Gregory Peck, the backlash began. His “serious leading-man” status took another hit in 1999 when he was arrested on drug charges after being found playing the bongos in the nude. (It’s hard to imagine Gregory Peck doing that.)

McConaughey made a partial career recovery with the time-honoured strategy of alternating smaller, quirky films (Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, Frailty, Tiptoes) with big-budget projects. He was a hunky submarine officer in U-571 and a hunky dragon-fighter in Reign of Fire. He tried to cap this by playing a hunky marine explorer in last summer’s Sahara, which he also produced. Despite the fact that novelist Clive Cussler’s hero Dirk Pitt is so iconic that he is legally trademarked, McConaughey failed to make an impression. All the camel-riding, boat-racing, cannon-shooting, torso-baring escapades felt less like an adventure for the audience and more like a paid advertisement for the star’s roguish, Southern-boy charms.

Taking that stand-up guy persona into the real world with a Hurricane Katrina blog (which was posted on Oprah’s website) was another misstep. McConaughey signed off his daily diary with the tagline “Just Keep Livin.” That might have been adorable as a bit of improv in Dazed and Confused, but is a little feeble in the face of a disaster. 

And now, McConaughey is back to try romantic comedy once more. Toned down as a pediatrician (with glasses!), he persuaded J.Lo in The Wedding Planner. Pumped up as an alpha-male advertising exec, he won Kate Hudson in How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days. If only he didn’t have that unchivalrous habit of looking like victory was never in doubt. In Failure to Launch, People magazine’s newly anointed Sexiest Man Alive is handsome, with bright blue eyes, a dazzling smile and — as the now obligatory shirtless scene proves — abs you could break bricks on. But handsome is as handsome does. McConaughey has always looked like a leading man, but he’s never managed to step up.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.

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