Party of Five

Here's an invitation to consider the past, present and future choices of five young actors who've survived murderous odds to become touchstones for their generation.

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In an industry fixated on the latest, not necessarily the best, only a handful of the young actors who rise to the top of the heap stay there for long. It takes an ineffable combination of talent, smarts, determination, looks, will, resilience and sheer luck to prevail over wrong-headed projects, masochistic miscasting, lost opportunities and ill-advised hairdos.

Matt Damon

Matt Damon's light-up-the-room grin, camera-grabbing good looks, cocky blue-collar charm and ferocious concentration all conspire to make him a rougher-hewn, grittier Tom Cruise. He's Cruise by way of Jimmy Cagney. With a gaze inner-lit by Boston bar neon and a stride quick with the rhythm of work boots down ethnic neighborhood streets, his screen persona shows darker, more openly ambiguous undercurrents than Cruise's, but it's toughened and strengthened by a similar inborn wisdom. Damon seems to realize how much his authenticity owes to the angst, urgency and insular humor of the Old Neighborhood. No matter the actual truth about his birth and upbringing, the camera reads him as the hunky Dead End Kid that the homecoming queen from the good side of town wants to take to the prom.

It's a boon to Damon's career mythology that he got plucked out of relative obscurity and dropped into the Cinderella spot by Francis Ford Coppola. The director who delivered to us the young Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan could have had his pick of the litter to play The Rainmaker's idealistic, up-by-the-bootstraps young attorney, but he chose a rookie, and Damon came through for him with an assured and unforced performance. Especially remarkable for an actor so new and raring to go was how Damon knew precisely when to take a backseat in his scenes with older pros like Jon Voight and Teresa Wright.

But it was Damon's own creation, Good Will Hunting, that brought him into focus as an actor and a star. How rare and refreshing that Damon and his lifelong buddy, Ben Affleck, created a script that neither condescends to, nor canonizes, working stiffs. What's more, try to name other actors of any age or era who've had the talent and perspective to write themselves roles that cut to the core of what makes them unique. The camera loves Damon's fresh-faced Americanism enough to practically share a BarcaLounger and a Bud with him, but this role invited the lens to probe the emotional black-and-blues under the kid's bravado, to observe the rage under the essential niceness.

Damon's Will hadn't yet reached the screen when Steven Spielberg chose him to play the soldier Tom Hanks goes looking for in Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg had probably responded to the emaciated, drug-addled, guilt-wracked Gulf War grunt Damon played in Courage Under Fire. In fact, the sprung demons that danced behind Damon's gaze in that performance may have been what convinced Spielberg that this young actor would be able to pump life into the woefully underwritten role of Ryan. As it turned out, the director was only half right, but playing the object of the harrowing search in Saving Private Ryan nevertheless shined up Damon's golden-boy status.

Anything coming after the double play of Good Will Hunting and Saving Private Ryan would have been anti-climactic for Damon. The respectable but self-inflated Rounders didn't hurt him or help him. His soul seemed lifetimes too young to play a gambling addict, but his choice of a role that would have been, in another era, prime sirloin for Robert Ryan or John Garfield showed energy and desire, qualities that are characteristic of his approach to his career. Two other crucial qualities Damon has are decisiveness and a taste for risk, both of which are evident in his upcoming projects. In Kevin Smith's nose-thumbing parody of established religion, Dogma, he and Ben Affleck will play fallen angels to Alanis Morissette's God. Here, one suspects, is a movie that has to be awfully good not to be just plain awful, but Damon jumped at the chance to do it. The silken, pansexual sociopath he'll play in The Talented Mr. Ripley is a daunting stretch, but one suspects all it took was a long look at director Anthony Minghella's work on The English Patient before he leapt in. Nor did he hesitate over the opportunity to be directed by Billy Bob Thornton in the part of a Holden Caulfield-meets-Gary Cooper cowboy in All the Pretty Horses.

Damon's willingness to mix the arty, the classy, the daring and the mainstream in his choice of roles shows a remarkably balanced approach to the game of career longevity. That and the sheer quantity of work he's eager to do sets him apart from most of Young Hollywood, which tends toward a paralyzing love-hate relationship with the commercial realities of filmmaking. Having brought off the miracle of getting the moviegoing world to fall in love with him, Damon is now ambitious enough to want to show how much of him there is. The best indication of the depth that will keep him in front of us for the long term is his determination to deal in the greater purposes of acting: he's intent on showing us who he is as a way of showing us who we are.

Winona Ryder

Everyone in the industry takes it as an article of faith that Winona Ryder is a class act. Her seriousness of effort, her innate gifts and her unusual beauty are indisputable. She's received two Oscar nominations. She's made films with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Tim Burton. She's gone head-to-head with Daniel Day-Lewis and come out the one blessed by the Academy. And she's managed to sustain--even heighten--her mystique while growing up in Hollywood. No wonder her peers respect the hell out of her.

Years of evidence attest to the pleasures Ryder can bring to the screen. As the wraithlike goth suburban teen who preferred dancing the calypso with the undead to hanging with her yucky white-bread family in Beetlejuice, she was Wednesday Addams hot-wired with Lolita. She and Christian Slater teased out dark, outlaw sexuality from each other in the wickedly wry Heathers. (She was the only girl in that high school movie who seemed to get how fine a line there is between the popular pom-pom girl and the geeky outcast.) A few years later she was spectacular in The Age of Innocence as a clear-eyed, deceptively passive young wife who quietly manipulates her husband into forgoing the love of his life and languishing in a cul-de-sac of boring convention and unrealized desire.

And yet, despite a resume more substantial than that of any other American actress her age, there's something oddly absent from Ryder's career to date--her sexual coming-of-age. Now in her late 20s and more beautiful than ever, she still hasn't found an adult male costar with whom she can ignite the way she did with Christian Slater back when she was a teenager. (Memo to, Ryder: no more costarring with Ethan Hawke or Lukas Haas.) Without the role and performance that declare her full-blown sexuality, all her attempts at self-emancipation into adulthood seem to short-circuit, leaving her in a sexual limbo somewhere between Peter Pan and Joan of Arc.

She generated steam with Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it was not enough to push her into the territory of full-blown, dangerous, erotic womanhood. The Crucible should have provided just the top-drawer, complex setting for her sexuality to find expression; here she was playing off her most intriguing paradoxes--chaste, yet provocative, earthy yet ethereal. But the whole tone and mood of that movie were so far off she couldn't cut through the muddle. Then again, perhaps it's just a matter of her voice and diction--those hard r'_s which were so endearing when she was a precocious youngster now have the ring of arrested development. There was encouraging offbeat chemistry between Ryder and Kenneth Branagh in _Celebrity--if only Woody Allen had given her enough space to develop a whole flesh-and-blood creation.

After a fallow period in the aftermath of the dispiriting Alien Resurrection, Ryder stepped up her pace and aggressively sought out newer directors. We'll next see her in cinematographer-turned-director Janusz Kaminski's Lost Souls, a big-budget project that has her playing a young woman who inadvertently learns she must convince an unknowing, handsome young journalist (played by Ben Chaplin) that he's the target of a conspiracy to bring Satan to earth. She'll then star as the psychologically embattled heroine of Cop Land director James Mangold's film version of the memoir Girl Interrupted, an Oscar-bait role that ought to exploit her gift for being simultaneously endearing and odd. But since she seems drawn to playing feisty, independent, gender-role challenging parts like the ones that attracted Katharine Hepburn in her day, she might take heed that Hepburn's legend arguably only took hold when she was paired with Spencer Tracy. One has to wonder where Ryder might find her Tracy. Could it be Matthew McConaughey? Ben Affleck? Edward Norton? Tom Cruise?

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