Book Review : Matthew McConaughey - Greenlights (2020)

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Matthew McConaughey is one of these people I’ve always unconditionally and irrationally liked. Obviously, his elite acting skills command respect and admiration, but he’s interesting beyond that. McConaughey is the closest thing we have from a real life all-American success story. He’s famous, but he’s also a family man. He works in Hollywood, but lives in Austin. More important: Matthew McConaughey appears to be the exact same person on screen, in media and in his private life.

Greenlights is the story of how he achieved fame and managed not to let is eat his soul.

Everyone wants to be famous, right? They want to matter to people they don’t know, so they can exist objectively in everybody’s conscience. Lots of people struggle all their lives to achieve fame, but it kind of just happened to Matthew McConaughey. In Greenlights, he reveals how the process of getting an audition for Dazed & Confused took only a few weeks and that director Richard Linklater expanded the character for him because he was fucking awesome in it.

Fame kind of happened to him. I mean, he pursued cinema and went to L.A to seek opportunities, but he never really struggled getting them. What he struggled with was keeping his head right and this is where Greenlights become interesting. Every weird quirk that made McConaughey interesting to outside observers were almost all attempts to remain grounded: living in a van for three years, moving to Austin, disappearing for weeks to go on weird trips, etc. It was his way to remain himself.

I can almost her you wonder: Ben, why would you believe his bullshit more than some other Hollywood weirdo’s? Fair question. Matthew McConaughey’s celebrity fascinates me because he managed it like every outside observer wished celebrities like him would. He avoided becoming an image or rather, he cultivated a public image that felt comfortable and compatible with his normal personality. In other words, he seems to have remained a relatively normal dude.

Proof? He’s been married to a Brazilian supermodel for eight years now and quietly raised three kids with her away from media attention. He’s doing pretty much whatever the fuck he feels like, whether it’s playing in a highly anticipated movie or rethinking student experience at his alma mater. He’s living the privilege of his celebrity for other purposes than prolonging the privilege of his celebrity. He’s living the fucking dream. He’s having his cake and he’s eating it too. You gotta respect that.

Greenlights is a memoir, I guess. But it’s also a roadmap that lead him to live such an interesting life. Don’t get me wrong. He seems like a weird dude and there are some eyebrow-raising shit in there, but he’s not weirder than what your weird, interesting friend is telling you at dinner. I mean, we all wish we travel to Africa to chase a wet dream we had, but we either lack the balls or the financial means to do it. Fortunately, Matthew McConaughey’s got both and he’s been making the most of it.

Dad respected yellow lights, and he made sure we learned the fundamentals before we expressed our individualism. To use a football term, he taught us to block and tackle before we could play wideout.

Is Greenlights supposed to tell us anything about the nature of celebrity? I don’t think so. McConaughey seems profoundly uninterested by the most glamorous aspects of his job. The main takeaway I got from it was that a strong family, experiences and a shitload of self-awareness were the bedrock to his unshakeable personality. Some of the best stories in Greenlights aren’t about himself. They’re about his father and brothers, and how they shaped the man he would become.

That is of absolutely zero help if you’re looking for guidance in your life, but it is if you have kids and want to start them right.

Sure, McConaughey is the narrator of his own story here. He could be making himself look like the hero of a story where he truly is the villain, like Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother. Who gives a shit? Here’s a guy who’s been doing exactly what he feels compelled to do instead of labouring at a job he doesn’t like for over twenty years, who doesn’t consistently need our attention all the time and he’s telling us how he’s been living a life everybody seems to want. Why not listen to him?

You can’t judge a memoir like Greenlights the exact same way you’d judge a novel. Sure, it’s entertaining. Sure, there are amazingly well-narrated stories in there. You can almost hear McConaughey’s voice when you read. But it doesn’t give us insight at to why he’s valuable in our culture? It kind of does. The key to McConaughey’s success seems to have been passion and never really holding on to material comfort. He never chase anything and it came anyway.

Read it. It’s a good book. Whether you like Matthew McConaughey as an actor or not, it’s not revelatory of anything, but there’s a little something for everyone in there.

7.6/10