‘THE LINCOLN LAWYER’

This 2011 film came after a two-year gap in McConaughey’s filmography. Whereas McConaughey was made famous by 1996’s “A Time to Kill” playing an altruistic lawyer defending a Black man in the South, in the “Lincoln Lawyer,” he plays a money-hungry, unscrupulous Los Angeles attorney with “NTGUILTY” emblazed on his license plate. It’s a slight but important course alteration toward darker material. McConaughey’s career was essentially started by Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater with “Dazed and Confused.” The role of David Wooderson has remained for McConaughey not just one role among many, but a This was the brashest announcement of McConaughey’s new boldness. In Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper film, he goes to depths of sleaze most actors would shy from. For an actor known for his quickness to de-shirt, his gyrating, blustering cowboythemed stripper was a selfparodying wink: a rodeo clown in skivvies. Most everyone in Lee Daniels’ garish, sweaty Florida noir was swamped by the thick Southern Gothic melodrama. How could anyone even remember McConaughey was in “The Paperboy” after the infamous jellyfish-sting scene with Nicole Kidman and Zach Efron? But the film still counts as the kind of risk McConaughey was starting to make routine. In many years, McConaughey’s supporting role as the title character in Jeff Nichols’ Mississippi River coming-ofage film would have gotten him Oscar consideration in its own right. In “Mud,” he plays a lovesick fugitive prone to (like McConaughey, himself) wide-eyed reverie. McConaughey has the larger-thanlife quality needed to make Mud seem mythic to the young boys who find him hiding out on an island. McConaughey’s transformation becomes literal in the story of HIV-infected Ron Woodroof. Losing some 45 pounds, it’s as though McConaughey physically sheds his former self. But, of course, Woodroof is a classic McConaughey character: a swaggering, swashbuckling Texan. But Woodroof’s desperation More than “Dallas Buyers Club,” the currently airing HBO series represents the very height of McConaughey’s abilities. McConaughey plays the police detective Rust Cohle in two very different versions, separated by numerous years. The older, long-haired, hard-drinking version is more typical McConaughey. But the younger Cohle is something different entirely: intellectual, poised and laconic. It’s like the weight loss of “Dallas Buyers Club” has had an afterglow effect, reshaping his manner and physicality. It’s fitting, perhaps, that McConaughey’s best performance should be alongside Woody Harrelson, his “Surfer, Dude” co-star. Due out in November, McConaughey stars in Christopher Nolan’s time-traveling sci-fi film “Interstellar,” one of the most anticipated movies of the year. The McConaissance continues.