It's hard to know how much Damon was willing to risk for a small role in Ed Zwick's "Courage Under Fire" (1996). Shedding 40 pounds too fast, he bought into a gambit that might have affected his long-term cardiac health. In the film, as he's interviewed by Denzel Washington, investigating a potential Medal of Honor recipient, he's an all-American kid, shy, soft-spoken, chain-smoking and twitchy, his eyes constantly darting away from Washington's steady gaze. In this one powerful take, Damon makes us see and feel how terrible is the secret eating his Sgt. Ilario alive. At their later, climactic meeting, the boy's face has gaunted, his flesh so skinned back, his features seem too big for the skull. "I shoot up between my toes," the guilt-ridden soldier confesses, and lets the awful truth out.

This brief performance was transfixing. Steven Spielberg must have looked into Sgt. Ilario's grief-stricken face and found his Private James Francis Ryan, the emblematic American boy so many soldiers die to bring home alive in "Saving Private Ryan" (1998). Echoes of Ilario are certainly there when, between bloody battles, Ryan confides in Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) that he can't remember his dead brothers' faces. Ever the teacher, Miller suggests that he think of a context, so Damon launches into a silly story about the last time the four Iowa farm boys were all together, careening about in a barn loft in purest slapstick, after setting him up to boff a girl "who took a nose-dive from the ugly tree and hit every branch goin' down."

Spielberg's camera homes in on that raw-boned Irish-American face, as it cracks up at the memory, half-shatters in pain — fully registering the boy whose whole life will be a testament to a great generation's sacrifice. It's a tour-de-force moment, one of the few times it seemed Damon might be losing it, free-falling rather than calculating the dramatic distance from here to there.

Even before "Ryan," Francis Ford Coppola had cast Damon as an earnest young lawyer in John Grisham's "The Rainmaker" (1997). But Sgt. Ilario's intensity went AWOL in this pleasantly sentimental, often clichéd entertainment. Oh, Damon dutifully decked out his idealistic ambulance-chaser in wide-eyed, Southern innocence, all sweetness and little light -- but the character came off as all craft, an assembly-line creation.

Similarly, a singular emotional passivity and reticence mar his performance as law-student/gambler in John Dahl's "Rounders" (1998). Edward Norton, playing a self-destructive, compulsive cheat, is all over the screen, acting up a storm -- as are John Malkovich, gargling an improbable Russian accent, and tightly wrapped John Turturro. They make Damon look stolid. He walks through the film, well, with a poker face, a cute kid at a costume party for crazy grown-ups.

Heath Ledger, left, and Damon in "The Brothers Grimm" (Miramax Films)

It's as though Damon the actor, disengaged, is watching some rather dull but dutiful part of himself walk through these movies, which sadly includes misfires like Billy Bob Thornton's "All the Pretty Horses" (2000) and Terry Gilliam's "The Brothers Grimm" (2005). Think of it this way: at Damon's best, Tom Ripley is one with Dickie Greenleaf, brains and beauty merged in the deliciously warm medium of the spotlight. At his worst, he's a good-looking Stepford star, running on autopilot.

Damon was raised in an academic commune of six families by a divorced mother who was a respected expert in child development. In such an intellectual petri dish, did the boy learn early to try on many masks, while searching for the one true version of himself? Maybe that's why Damon is often at his best in movies that feature characters with split or mirrored identities.

In "Good Will Hunting," the film that catapulted him and writing/acting partner Ben Affleck into stardom (nine Oscar noms, one win for original script), Damon plays a broken-souled genius who finds a home in the tribal friendship of his Boston buddies, loyal to a fault, and then in the paternal embrace of Robin Williams' shrink. Will ricochets from one flawed mirror to another, until he's able to face his awful past and the potential of his future. In "Ripley," Tom murdered Dickie to create himself -- an invention that may be repeated ad infinitum -- but Will's self-discovery sparks his "good" father's rebirth and fulfills his best friend's dreams.

(You might have imagined that longtime friends Affleck and Damon were writing themselves out of Boston's lower classes, so that "Good Will" might be wish-fulfillment in action for the duo who suddenly became golden. But Damon, just 12 credits short of a Harvard degree, and the California-born Affleck were closer to Dickie Greenleaf's world of privilege than Will Hunting's shanty Irish.)

Isn't "the thing everything leads to" in "Gerry" (2002), Gus Van Sant's third film with Damon, the same object of desire that drives Damon at the beginning of "The Bourne Identity" -- when he demands "Who am I?" of his mirror reflection? Two men, both named Gerry, trudge onward in a mesmerizing, nearly wordless pilgrimage through the desert. Seems the trek will never end -- until the weaker fellow (Casey Affleck) breaks down, collapses. Some kind of mysterious wrestling match occurs, or maybe it's a desperate embrace -- and Damon's Gerry walks away, immediately spying the highway and safety. Was this murder? Of a friend? Of some unwanted or crippled aspect of self? Damon's proud of this enigmatic exercise -- to which he contributed dialogue -- figuring it will stand in 20 years while some of his big-money projects may disappear.

(Not to sink too deeply into amateur psychologizing, but you have to wonder how much "Gerry" might reflect Damon's need to escape or grow out of what he once called "the Matt and Ben thing," the symbiotic celebrity the two enjoyed after "Good Will Hunting." Was there a trace of Tom and Dickie in that "thing"? Did Matt dream of leaving charming, blustery Ben behind in those days when Affleck was the bigger star?)

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