Far and away the best reason to see Dallas Buyers Club is Matthew McConaughey. His acting has been the
best it’s ever been these last 18 months. He’s an actor of range and talent his
early typecasting had done much to hide. After his Dazed and Confused early breakout performance and toiling in roles
as idealistic young lawyers (A Time To
Kill, Amistad), he became a star on the back of leading shallow shirtless
lunkhead roles in increasingly exasperating comedies. But now, after his wide
range of interesting supporting roles as of late, he’s grown into a career
that’s varied, fascinating, and consistently excellent. With roles as a
small-town prosecutor in Bernie, a
sleazy hitman in Killer Joe, a strip
club proprietor in Magic Mike, a
fugitive in Mud, and reporter in The Paperboy, he made great
movies (the first three) and less than good movies (the latter two) better for
his being there. He went from a name that was no added value to a film’s
promotion to a name that causes my attention to perk up when I see it in the
cast of an upcoming project.
In Dallas Buyers Club,
McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof a hard-drinking horndog who spends his time
gambling and carousing when he’s not picking up day labor as an electrician to
supplement his rodeo income. But he’s clearly ill, gaunt, sickly skeletal.
McConaughey inhabits this diseased frame with painfully thin confidence, his
swagger and charisma shining through so strongly I was afraid all the more that
he’d break right in front of our eyes. The soundtrack picks up some
high-frequency whines as he winces, overcome with pain as he squints and hopes
it’ll pass quickly. It’s after a workplace accident that his blood happens to
be drawn and flagged for further testing. The doctors (Jennifer Garner and
Denis O’Hare) bring him the sad results: he has HIV. It’s the 1980s and
HIV/AIDS is a mystery disease and treatment is fragmentary and rare. It’s
widely assumed to be a disease affecting only gay people, so Woodroof, faced
with a death sentence, reacts in a homophobic huff. It’s a mistake, he says,
storming out of the building.
But what if it’s not a mistake? That’s the question that
haunts Woodroof as he comes to accept the diagnosis. Told the best the hospital
can do is offer him a spot in a clinical trial that may or may not help him, he
researches treatment options, finding useful supplements that are unavailable
in the States. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved these
apparently helpful substances, so Woodroof sets out to get some, figuring he
might as well help his fellow HIV/AIDS patients in the process. Craig Borten
and Melisa Wallack’s screenplay relays the events as a sort of big-pharma
medical heist story with a libertarian anti-FDA bent, smuggling meds through a
loophole and getting them to those in need. Woodroof sets up a Buyers Club,
selling memberships that entitle dues-paying customers as much medicine as they
need. By not charging for the unapproved chemicals directly, he’s able to avoid
directly breaking the law.
It’s the story of a man outliving his initial 30-day
diagnosis, an angry prejudiced man thrown by circumstance into a culture he
barely knows and doesn’t understand, but is initially certain he hates anyway.
An early scene, shortly after his diagnosis sent gay slurs flying off his
tongue in denial, finds his friends shunning him, spitting those same slurs
back at him. He’s clearly crushed by this betrayal and that association, but
soon his hospital roommate, a transgender man named Rayon (Jared Leto), becomes
his business partner and friend. They have a fun and unlikely buddy chemistry
that feeds into the film’s heist-like patter, even though their gaunt
appearances and oft-ragged voices are clear indications that no matter the good
they do, the end to their stories won’t be a cure. Even as they get these goods
around the law, the FDA is sniffing around, circling, looking for a reason to
shut their operation down. It’s about perseverance in a fight between
bureaucracy and urgency, between funereal paranoia and hope.
The screenplay leans on speechifying and easy lessons, but
has performances so electric that there’s a sense of liveliness to it all.
Director Jean-Marc Vallée is hardly a subtle director. Why, the opening scene
cross cuts a distractedly shot sex scene with a panting horse nearly throwing a
rider in the rodeo, as if to make completely sure even the least observant
audience member immediately gets the metaphor for risky behavior as HIV danger.
There’s no room for subtlety here with filmmaking that’s largely only functional.
But Vallée trusts his actors to put across this material, letting them express
complexities of emotions in scenes that give them full attention. McConaughey
runs away with the film with his frighteningly wiry intensity, balancing charm
and disreputability, acting circles around Leto’s impressive-in-its-own-way
look-ma-I’m-acting roller coaster of laughing, crying, flirting, and coughing.
It’s a film that’s largely a safe, solid, moralizing
based-on-a-true-story message movie with plentiful generic uplift and
triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity good feelings. But the acting is so strong,
from McConaughey especially, that the performers manage to make it worthwhile. It
might’ve seemed irredeemably phony if it were not for such a solid lead
performance holding the whole thing together. If you want a more comprehensive,
deeply felt, fully contextualized look at the 1980’s fight against the AIDS
virus and those who would deny full opportunities for help, I’ll point you to
last year’s excellent documentary How to
Survive a Plague. But if you want to get a glimpse at the subject while
appreciating yet again why McConaughey has become one of our most reliably
excellent actors, here’s your chance. He sells everything down to the smallest
moments, making subtlely out of broadness. I particularly like a scene in which
he accompanies Rayon to a gay bar looking to recruit new Buyers Club members.
He silently gives beefcake photos on the wall the side-eye, as if to suggest a
man who is almost, but not quite, willing to loosen his bigotry in order to
help his fellow man.
No comments:
Post a Comment