What happened to Matthew Broderick? That depends on how much promise you may have rather thoughtlessly paper-clipped onto his tissue-thin screen persona, as he aged from teenage Neil Simon ingenu to the exhausted, hound-doggish semi-human he appeared to be amid the narcotic destruction of Godzilla.
It would have been foolish, at any point in Broderick's 15-year career, to place too much hope on the guy - particularly on the strength of his popular self-referential high-schooler in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - but there's no denying that in his youth (he debuted in Max Dugan Returns at 21), Broderick had an energy and a way with dialogue that stood out. Look at any Broderick performance and you'll see what is usually underwritten tripe given its best shot at being deft comedy.
Strangely, his finest hour might have been The Cable Guy, opposite human tornado Jim Carrey, in a role that got at the discomfort and dread that seemed to possess Broderick more and more as he grew older. Once a blithely confident post-teen, Broderick couldn't help but age into an uneasy and disquieting adult.
Disquieting for us, that is, in that he's no longer much fun to watch. Has any other hot young actor from the early eighties - think John Cusack, Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez - got so slow, so doughy, so fearful? (True, C Thomas Howell is still making cheap movies, but was he ever promising to begin with?)
Broderick first made his mark on the stage doing Neil Simon shtick in Brighton Beach Memoirs, and immediately graduated from being Marsha Mason's smart-mouthed teenage son in Max Dugan to playing the whiz-kid lead in WarGames, on whose box-office success Broderick coasted for several years. What does Hollywood do with this pasty, fey, doe-eyed New Yawker? Have him play a mediaeval peasant, naturally, in Ladyhawke (no less misplaced than the film's synthesiser score), as enjoyably wrong-headed as any movie of the eighties. (Still, it's a disarming moment when Broderick, having witnessed Michelle Pfeiffer change from a hawk into a woman at sunset just as her lover changes from a man to a wolf, flatly asks: "Are you flesh or are you spirit?" and she replies, "I am sorrow.")
Doing Horton Foote (in 1918 and On Valentine's Day), just as he used to do Neil Simon, had little impact because only the cast, crew and the Foote family even saw the damn things, but then in 1986 came Ferris Bueller, a quick-witted teen comedy about which all you need say is that American vice-president Dan Quayle admitted it as his favourite film, some time after proclaiming he'd need to learn Latin before visiting Latin America. Fondly remembered enough to make you worry about the state of mankind, Bueller remains nonetheless a testament to Broderick's former adeptness at making mousse from mud. His to-the-camera address alone is a flourish few actors could get away with, living or dead - I'm thinking, maybe, George Sanders, if he could ever have played a teenager.
Then, it was a struggle to retain the tenuous claim Broderick had on leading-man status, as he succumbed to Simon again in Biloxi Blues, co-starred with chimps in Project X, came out of the closet for Torch Song Trilogy, went back in for unfocused central roles in Glory and Family Business. By this time - 1989 - Broderick was a 27-year-old misfit who tried to play his age but only remained convincing as a teen, not unlike compatriot Michael J Fox, who is actually a year older. It's a terrible conundrum for an actor to find himself in, and Broderick had little clue how to proceed. (Fox, at least, had a greedy smugness that always seemed queasily grown up.) Andrew Bergman came to the rescue with The Freshman, giving Broderick a meaty college-age roster of reactive frenzy and double-take that suited his fading talents to a tee.
Bergman sustained the careers, in similar fashion, of Alan Arkin (The In-Laws) and Nicolas Cage (Honeymoon In Vegas), but Broderick still floundered in movies no one saw, including Infinity, a romantic biopic of physicist Richard Feynman that Broderick directed, after having his mother write the screenplay. It was around this time that Broderick, on vacation in Ireland with girlfriend Jennifer Grey, was involved in a high-speed auto accident that resulted in a double fatality. He was hurt, too; a very real trauma that, as we know from watching Montgomery Clift's last movies, can ruin an actor's appeal and confidence for good.
The Cable Guy should have been a godsend, but it was instead a curse. Say what you will, no other actor or movie could have managed the chilling moment when Broderick, estranged from his fiancee and befriended by Carrey's monstrous Nowhere Man, hears that the beautiful woman he'd seduced during a party was, in fact, a prostitute hired by Carrey ("My treat!"). When Carrey, with a chuckle, asks, "Do you think a woman like that would hang out with us if we weren't paying?" Broderick crumples and moans, "Oh my God" with a woundedness that's almost cataclysmic. It's a brilliant turn in a troubling film, but Broderick's stock went nowhere. He has become one of those actors, like Matthew Modine, that no one regards highly, no one especially likes, and no one has much confidence in, but who get low-paying lead roles because, a) they don't cost a bundle, and b) they are at least familiar to, if not enrapturing of, audiences.
Godzilla is, of course, the ultimate indignity, a movie an actor only takes to pay some serious bills; in Broderick's case, there may have been some mortifying civil suits to clear up. To watch Broderick, now 36, unhappily go through the motions of alarm and terror before a giant, dull, digital dinosaur that will only actually be there in post-production, is to watch Hollywood eat its young. Broderick reaching middle age in movies will be a punishing experience, for him and us - but must we watch?
