Famous for Being Famous

By Richard Corliss Sunday, Mar. 21, 1999
    • All right. After three years of hype, hokum and ho-hum, we finally get it: Matthew McConaughey has star quality. We weren't so sure back when McConaughey was in every other film and on every other magazine cover. His summer-of-'96 double whammy, A Time to Kill and Lone Star, gave evidence of a gritty, ingratiating talent. But he looked lost amid the more seasoned actors in Amistad, and no one could have brought to sensible life the woozy guru he played in Contact. It seemed as if McConaughey might lapse into ex-hunk obscurity, like those slightly too-good-looking fellows spotted behind a counter at a California video store.

    That's where Ed Pekurny, the guy McConaughey plays in the new Ron Howard comedy EDtv, works when he isn't tossing one back with his rakehell brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) or refereeing battles at home in a blue-collar section of San Francisco. Ed is apparently at ease in a bizarre family and unthinkingly content with a go-nowhere job. He doesn't even want what Ray has a quick itch for: to be on a TV show that will feature his real life 24 hours a day.

    To figure out what happens next, Ed, or you, might look in a video store, under Jim Carrey. The ghost of The Truman Show stalks EDtv, and it can't be shaken, as--guess what--Ed is chosen to be in the show. Ray gets jealous, Ray's girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman) gets the warms for Ed, instant celebrity makes Ed antsy, and the network's Mephistophelian boss (Rob Reiner) tries to shape the story line of his new star's life, almost as Ed Harris' TV mogul did for Carrey's Truman Burbank.

    Note: EDtv isn't copycat filmmaking, exactly. The Howard film--written, with their usual comic clarity, by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel--is a version of the 1994 Quebec farce Louis 19, le roi des ondes. But Hollywood, temporarily bereft of original ideas, has become fascinated by its power to create and corrupt. It looks at O.J., Monica, the rubes and rhubarbs on Jerry Springer and asks, with a mixture of self-accusation and self-awe, What have we done?

    It's a bit disingenuous for rich and famous moviemakers to tell us how awful it is to be rich and famous on television. As it happens, the moral of EDtv is of less import than its tone--which seems loosey-goosey but is carefully land-mined with gags--and its characters, who are unremarkable but worth getting to know. Shari, for instance, is a woman at profound discomfort in her bountiful body. Ray treats Shari as a gaudy accessory, and she accepts his evaluation. Elfman paints a nice portrait of a woman fighting for esteem. (Psst: she gets it from Ed.)

    But McConaughey is the news here, dimples showing through the chin scruff, drawling out punch lines so you don't hear the rim shot, anchoring a film with enough weirdos to populate a Preston Sturges comedy. It's odd that this movie, not a star vehicle, should allow him to radiate star quality, and that's due in part to Howard's gift with actors. But it's more about this actor's sure connection with the character and the camera, and through them, the mass of moviegoers. Here he plays a man with the resources to handle unearned fame. Now McConaughey has earned his own fame.