Well, here's one reason why. Eleven years ago, Matt Damon had a small part in a film called Courage Under Fire. It was the story of an episode from the first Iraq war when a young officer (Meg Ryan), killed in action, had possibly qualified for the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Denzel Washington (with his own problems) is given the job of investigating her claim to the medal, so the film is full of flashbacks that tell the stories of the other guys in the group. One of them is a kid named Ilario (Damon). He's thin, twisted and utterly beyond being trusted - and it's the best bit of acting Damon has ever done, based on the natural order that picked him out early as a supporting actor, made for unreliable guys.
But then, along the way, he and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting. Enough people told Damon he was middle America and fit to be a star - especially if he was a little less noticeable. With that recipe for success - essentially to be more blank and less interesting - he stumbled into the role of Jason Bourne, an operative with lethal skills who doesn't quite understand where they come from or how he got them because his memory is shaky.
Damon, at 37, still has the look of a stubborn little boy, and he uses it three-quarters of the time for Jason Bourne. Of course, Damon does other things. He is coming up with his third Ocean's film, where he plays Linus Caldwell - can you remember anything he has actually done in the series?
He has also dug out a hole for himself in big espionage films, or pictures about lost identity, where it suits the script for him to have a numb, stricken look - things like Syriana, The Good Shepherd and even The Talented Mr Ripley, which is far and away his best big picture so far, even if the set-up has him surviving when the very seductive Jude Law has to die early. However, there is a resilience in Damon, a patience that seems to know (without understanding why) that luck is on his side. So he got the part of Private Ryan, and he did The Rainmaker years ago with Francis Ford Coppola so that Coppola thought to call on him for his new comeback film, Youth Without Youth, set in the Balkans in the 1930s - which might be one of those events where people start talking about how they always knew Damon had something.
One sad fact, though, is that he has the inescapable look of a kid - and he's not the only promising young actor who seems stranded on the far side of maturity. Can those looks change? Can he somehow find a way of regaining the desperate, flawed energy of Ilario in Courage Under Fire?
Or is he doomed to be all-American? There were signs in The Good Shepherd of something really creepy and more than promising. He played a lifelong spy, not just a solid, midfield pro, but a man born to be a spy and so secretive and withdrawn that he begins to forget why he might be married to Angelina Jolie.
That's a good test of an actor - put him with Jolie and see if he still can't remember. So I nurse a hope that Damon might have it in him to play some really unpleasant characters - like the generation that has been in office in the US for seven years now. Who wants to see the Nasty Private Life of Alberto Gonzalez?
Damon could do it.
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