Matthew McConaughey’s explanation of the term “Greenlights” is indicative of the book overall: you get a sense of what he means without really knowing for sure what it is. Because, like taking nearly two pages to explain essentially positive thinking/luck, McConaughey spends an entire book rambling from genres like memoir to self help to spirituality without really committing to any, and, despite talking about himself the entire time, when you get to the end, you don’t really feel like you’ve gotten to know him at all. That said, there’s enough entertaining stuff in Greenlights to make it a decent read.
The best stories here and mostly from before he was famous. My favourite was when he went to Australia for a year as part of the student exchange program and got stuck with a kooky family that lived in the middle of nowhere and drove poor Matthew crazy. McConaughey’s parents were real characters too and the stories featuring them, particularly his dad, were all brilliant - like how his dad resurrected their pet cockatiel Lucky through putting him in his mouth!
I liked the anecdote of McConaughey working on the set of an early movie he did called Scorpion Spring, where he didn’t learn his lines until right before shooting - unsurprisingly it didn’t work out well. I also didn’t know he was once balding (lookit that hairline on the cover!) and that prompted his look for the movie Reign of Fire - something called Regenix really works, apparently, especially if you shave your head to start with. And his training regime for that same movie was amusingly bonkers.
McConaughey, it turns out, is a surprisingly good writer (or had a great editor), a warm, self-deprecating and funny person and a fantastic storyteller, who’s at his best when he’s telling stories from his life. When he veers away from that into amorphous life lessons territory is where things get vague and a bit tedious - his prose in these parts becomes like that of a freewheeling beat poet.
I wasn’t that taken with the interstitials: bumperstickers (deliberately conflated into one word by McConaughey), scraps of “outlaw logic” and poems. Bumperstickers like “Localize to customize. Adapt to modify. The Renaissance Man is at home where he goes”, “Once you know it’s black, it’s not near as dark”, and “Just because the seats are empty doesn’t mean they’re not taken. Sometimes the guest list needs to be for one. You.” don’t do anything for me.
And a lot of the poems are… well, they wouldn’t be published if McConaughey wasn’t a movie star! Poems like Man Enuf (“Man enuf not to know, man enuf to find out, just man enuf” or The Genie’s in the Steam (“Some call it juice, some call it magic, the genie’s in the magic, the magic’s in the steam”) felt like they were included to beef up the page count and fill space rather than because they added all that much to the content.
Despite all these bits and pieces of New Age-y wisdom, nothing profound is really imparted and, for a guy pertaining to be deep and spiritual, quite a lot of this book feels quite shallow. And I wished he’d not spent so long writing about his wife Camila - we get it, he loves her - and instead explored stories he’d hinted at earlier in the book, like doing peyote in a cage in Mexico with a MOUNTAIN LION or how he came to be molested by a man when he was 18 and knocked unconscious (although he does tell the story of getting arrested for playing the bongos nekkid).
McConaughey disappointingly glosses over stories from the movies he’s made in the last ten years during his “McConaissance” (he coined the term apparently) when I’d’ve loved to have heard more about making True Detective, Interstellar and Free State of Jones. He talks a little on True Detective and The Wolf of Wall Street and does go into Dallas Buyers Club quite a bit, the movie that won him the Best Actor Oscar, but it’s odd that, considering he’s famous for acting, there’s very little here on that side of his life in this book.
Maybe there’s not much to them - they were just jobs? He does address the ‘00s when his movies were just romantic comedy after romantic comedy and simply shrugs about it - he enjoyed making those types of movies at that time - before deciding he wanted more substantial material and gave up the easy paydays in search of more challenging (but far less lucrative) roles. It’s odd that it took him nearly two years to make the switch - you’d think a famous actor would be able to do whatever type of movie they wanted, particularly lower budget ones that rarely have celebrities in - but I guess that’s Hollywood.
Or something. Because I’m still not sure on how the world works at that level of fame and fortune and that side of his life is still strangely unclear - I got the sense that McConaughey wants to talk more but probably can’t because he’s still a working actor who wants to keep making movies for years to come, so the spicy anecdotes he likely has need to stay untold for the time being.
It’s not all greenlights throughout but there’s enough here to hold your attention and I wasn’t ever that unengaged for long - Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights is alright, alright, alright.
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