McConaugheMay Day 3: Two for the Money
Maybe unfair, but any 2000’s era movie, for me, has to be graded on a curve when it comes to female characters. The 2000s were maybe the most misogynistic decade in film America has ever had? Pick any random mainstream movie released in the 2000s and chances are it will feature a woman so obviously written by a man that it feels like a hate crime. As an experiment, I used a random movie title generator and it brought me Never Back Down, a film in which Amber Heard plays a character named Baja Miller who exists to entice Sean Faris as a MMA-curious high schooler to beat up her boyfriend. Point well and truly made there, I think. The point is that the bar is buried so deep in the ground that just having a woman deliver a good performance, even for a non-character, puts any 2000s movie head and shoulders over most other mainstream movies in the entire decade. So, negatives first, this is a movie in which you just have to give up on seeing a nuanced woman onscreen. It’s 2005, it wasn’t gonna happen anyway. Kelly Reichardt couldn't even make a movie in this town until 2006. Sucks, but it is what it is.
That said, if you can get over that hurdle (and I completely understand if you can’t) this is a pretty good movie for boys with daddy issues. The plot follows McConaughey as a former college football star whose busted knee has landed him in cubicle purgatory with a whole lot of regrets. Enter Al Pacino as a "sports consultant" mogul who tells the degenerate gambles of the world which team to bet on and how much to win. As it turns out, Brandon Lang (McConaughey) has a knack for it, and Pacino takes the younger man under his wing in the big city. Surprisingly, this under-seen film might be Matthew McConaughey’s best performance? It’s in his range (as discussed in Green Lights, the character heavily mirrors his own real life story of early football stardom ruined by a knee injury), and he takes his natural charm and just turns up the naivety a notch, and it really works. He has great chemistry with Al Pacino playing a loser who accidentally finds himself having become a winner and is desperate to restore the natural order. It's very interesting to watch Pacino actively find his successor and a hotter man to fuck his wife just so he can finally see the world be as shitty as he feels. It turns into a sports betting version of Cocktail’s subtextually queer relationship, (which was already only barely subtextual). Almost impossible to not see Al Pacino as bisexual in this.
The film trades on the same kind of “descent into evil” that you see from stockbroker movies like Wolf of Wall Street or Wall Street, but there’s more honor in sports betting (saying very little here) so it’s more fun to see McConaughey’s freakish obsession with football players’ lives to make up for his own career failure work out. Not as good as Uncut Gems but pretty good “We have Uncut Gems at home” even if it chickens out from the ending being as dire and cynical as the movie seems to want it to be.
Fun to see my favorite guy Detective Fusco (Kevin Chapman) from Person of Interest pop up as a notable background extra a few times. Great face, great vibes.
Too long, or maybe I had to watch this right before getting to work and I barely made it. Scheduling is the hardest part, just like last year.