Chris Knipp
12-01-2013, 12:10 PM
Jean-Marc Vallée: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (2013)
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8716/opvc.jpg
JARED LETO AND MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY IN DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Homophobe serves gays because he's got the gay disease
Dallas Buyers Club is an uneven but worthwhile film about the early days of AIDS. It dramatizes the true story of Ron Woodroof, played by Matthew McConaughey in another in his long recent string of bold character roles. Ron is a macho Good Old Boy who lives a wild life. He's a homophobic, alcoholic, cocaine-abusing, womanizing rodeo-rider electrician in Texas in 1985, in the early days of the epidemic. Running on a collision course of drugs, sex, alcohol and overexertion, he collapses one day and winds up in the hospital, nearly dead. There he is tested and informed that he's got HIV -- the "gay disease." The reaction of Woodroof as depicted here, when a doctor running an AZT trial (Denis O'Hare) gives him this terrible news, is to spew forth a stream of expletives and stalk out. (He's had a blood transfusion, so he's got his strength back.) But this isn't just a dramatic gesture. Woodroof eventually winds up becoming a champion of experimental AIDS treatment against the US drug and medical establishment.
Ron Woodroof would never use a mild, kindly name like "gay." He prefers vernacular words like "fag,""fairy," "homo," or more vivid ones we'll not mention here. The doctor has told Ron he has at most 30 days to live. Though he gets that he has AIDS, he does not accept this one-month sentence. Instead his pro-active adoption -- outside of hospital and government-approval limit-setting -- of the latest in anti-AIDS drug and supplement cocktails, enables him to live for seven years with the disease -- at a time when the drug availability situation in the USA is drastic for AIDS sufferers. But not only that: his efforts also enable hundreds of others to prolong their lives. Ron never quite stops being rabidly homophobic. But the majority of the patients his drug-distribution system administers to are gay. And his eventual business partner and best friend in adversity is a transsexual. Not just politics, but also disease, makes strange bedfellows.
One might rashly dismiss Dallas Buyers Club. After all Matthew McConaughey is doing his Good Old Boy shtick once again, even if a still saltier, more outsider version of it. The AIDS topic seems a bit belated. Jean-Marc Vallée is a French Canadian director with little in the way of a consistent style from film to film. He doesn't maintain a very firm hand here: his direction is uneven, the screenplay and editing choppy and at times losing focus. One can reject this movie as transparent "Oscar bait." McConaughey's character is wreathed in the tragedy of a fatal disease, and he has taken that guaranteed step to "serious performance" status -- losing a ton of weight for the role.
Well, it's still important material, and the performances of McConaughey and his co-star Jared Leto (who plays his trannie partner, Rayon) are brave and committed. There's just one thing to remember. As A.O. Scott pointed out (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/movies/matthew-mcconaughey-stars-in-dallas-buyers-club.html?_r=0), the screenplay seriously neglects the social context of AIDS in America in omitting mention of the larger struggles for drug availability of the East Coast ACT-UP community portrayed in David France's documentary, How to Survive a Plague (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3246-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2012&p=27539#post27539).
The movie tells the story of Ron Woodroof's war with the drug establishment better than it tells of his personal struggle with AIDS. McConaughey's 50-pound weight loss is just there from the first. It doesn't change. The illness is expressed by glassy eyes and a single token sarcoma-like lesion on the side of his forehead, which goes away when he starts taken drugs and supplements that work. If anything he seems to get better. But what of his seven-year struggle to resist HIV? We remember his drinking and cocaine-snorting more than anything. And he's continually feisty throughout the rest of the movie, except when he collapses. AIDS conditions are not depicted in any detail, nor are they seen in Leto's look or behavior either, though he appears to have lost a lot of weight for his role as Rayon too. But McConaughey's emaciated condition does give his traditional southern swagger a tragic edge in this new context.
At the start of this period the Food and Drug Administration is only allowing the one AIDS drug AZT to be tested in double-blind trials and in too-high doses that are just making full-on AIDS sufferers die faster, and all other drugs available in other countries are illegal. Ron starts a "buyers club" to distribute non-approved drugs and supplements to AIDS patients, and the FDA and pharmaceutical companies fight him tooth and nail. But against arrests, seizures of his stashes, and court, Woodroof still goes on fighting for his life, the new drugs, and his ability to distribute them. The buyers club and some rich gay men's donation of a palatial house provide Ron and Rayon with a living and a better place to operate out of than the cheesy motel they occupy at first.
Dallas Buyers Club's is also a story that says one can achieve recovery and redemption without losing oneself. Eventually Ron does cut down on the booze, because he learns to live healthy, avoid toxins. "Put that back," he tells Rayon when he/she grabs some processed meat or a bag of chips for their grocery cart. But he's always the foul-mouthed, provocative macho man (even when he's too ill to get it up). His feistiness is his primary tool in fighting the establishment.
This move has a dry, no-nonsense quality that contrasts with the corn of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. But though Philadelphia may have sounded the death knell of Demme's career as a maker of hip, hilarious movies and was bourgeois and tame, it had the features of a grand, well-made, classy tear-jerker. Besides its A-listers, Hanks and Washington, it had its operatic-dance-with-the-drip-stand moment and its breathless courtroom scenes. Dallas Buyers Club hasn't anything that good. Ron Woodroof has his drip-stand scenes too, but they don't rise to the level of poetry or high drama. They're just shows of pluck or provocation. Vallée's film is most vivid in its early sequences depicting Ron's raucous lifestyle and the hostile encounters when his old buddies decide he's a "fag."
Dallas Buyer's Club, never boldly original as a movie, takes its most conventional turn in Ron's would-be romance with Dr. Saks, the physician he meets his first time in hospital, played by the bland Jennifer Garner. The Dr. Saks character does double duty. Her growing conflict with Dr. Sevard, the supervisor of the AZT trial, dramatizes the way lines are being drawn between patient advocacy and hard-line medical establishment stonewalling (no pun intended). And Ron's persistent efforts to romance her are a nod to rom-com as well as reassurance, if needed, that through it all the sexuality of his fellow AIDS sufferers hasn't rubbed off on him. His final scene is back at a rodeo. Isn't that playing up the pluck a bit? The man is, after all, dying. Yet though McConaughey's character in Mud was subtler, of all his string of recent more adventurous roles this is the one he most fully and memorably inhabits.
Dallas Buyers Club, 117 mins., which debuted at Toronto, was released in the US 22 Nov. 2013.
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8716/opvc.jpg
JARED LETO AND MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY IN DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Homophobe serves gays because he's got the gay disease
Dallas Buyers Club is an uneven but worthwhile film about the early days of AIDS. It dramatizes the true story of Ron Woodroof, played by Matthew McConaughey in another in his long recent string of bold character roles. Ron is a macho Good Old Boy who lives a wild life. He's a homophobic, alcoholic, cocaine-abusing, womanizing rodeo-rider electrician in Texas in 1985, in the early days of the epidemic. Running on a collision course of drugs, sex, alcohol and overexertion, he collapses one day and winds up in the hospital, nearly dead. There he is tested and informed that he's got HIV -- the "gay disease." The reaction of Woodroof as depicted here, when a doctor running an AZT trial (Denis O'Hare) gives him this terrible news, is to spew forth a stream of expletives and stalk out. (He's had a blood transfusion, so he's got his strength back.) But this isn't just a dramatic gesture. Woodroof eventually winds up becoming a champion of experimental AIDS treatment against the US drug and medical establishment.
Ron Woodroof would never use a mild, kindly name like "gay." He prefers vernacular words like "fag,""fairy," "homo," or more vivid ones we'll not mention here. The doctor has told Ron he has at most 30 days to live. Though he gets that he has AIDS, he does not accept this one-month sentence. Instead his pro-active adoption -- outside of hospital and government-approval limit-setting -- of the latest in anti-AIDS drug and supplement cocktails, enables him to live for seven years with the disease -- at a time when the drug availability situation in the USA is drastic for AIDS sufferers. But not only that: his efforts also enable hundreds of others to prolong their lives. Ron never quite stops being rabidly homophobic. But the majority of the patients his drug-distribution system administers to are gay. And his eventual business partner and best friend in adversity is a transsexual. Not just politics, but also disease, makes strange bedfellows.
One might rashly dismiss Dallas Buyers Club. After all Matthew McConaughey is doing his Good Old Boy shtick once again, even if a still saltier, more outsider version of it. The AIDS topic seems a bit belated. Jean-Marc Vallée is a French Canadian director with little in the way of a consistent style from film to film. He doesn't maintain a very firm hand here: his direction is uneven, the screenplay and editing choppy and at times losing focus. One can reject this movie as transparent "Oscar bait." McConaughey's character is wreathed in the tragedy of a fatal disease, and he has taken that guaranteed step to "serious performance" status -- losing a ton of weight for the role.
Well, it's still important material, and the performances of McConaughey and his co-star Jared Leto (who plays his trannie partner, Rayon) are brave and committed. There's just one thing to remember. As A.O. Scott pointed out (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/movies/matthew-mcconaughey-stars-in-dallas-buyers-club.html?_r=0), the screenplay seriously neglects the social context of AIDS in America in omitting mention of the larger struggles for drug availability of the East Coast ACT-UP community portrayed in David France's documentary, How to Survive a Plague (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3246-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2012&p=27539#post27539).
The movie tells the story of Ron Woodroof's war with the drug establishment better than it tells of his personal struggle with AIDS. McConaughey's 50-pound weight loss is just there from the first. It doesn't change. The illness is expressed by glassy eyes and a single token sarcoma-like lesion on the side of his forehead, which goes away when he starts taken drugs and supplements that work. If anything he seems to get better. But what of his seven-year struggle to resist HIV? We remember his drinking and cocaine-snorting more than anything. And he's continually feisty throughout the rest of the movie, except when he collapses. AIDS conditions are not depicted in any detail, nor are they seen in Leto's look or behavior either, though he appears to have lost a lot of weight for his role as Rayon too. But McConaughey's emaciated condition does give his traditional southern swagger a tragic edge in this new context.
At the start of this period the Food and Drug Administration is only allowing the one AIDS drug AZT to be tested in double-blind trials and in too-high doses that are just making full-on AIDS sufferers die faster, and all other drugs available in other countries are illegal. Ron starts a "buyers club" to distribute non-approved drugs and supplements to AIDS patients, and the FDA and pharmaceutical companies fight him tooth and nail. But against arrests, seizures of his stashes, and court, Woodroof still goes on fighting for his life, the new drugs, and his ability to distribute them. The buyers club and some rich gay men's donation of a palatial house provide Ron and Rayon with a living and a better place to operate out of than the cheesy motel they occupy at first.
Dallas Buyers Club's is also a story that says one can achieve recovery and redemption without losing oneself. Eventually Ron does cut down on the booze, because he learns to live healthy, avoid toxins. "Put that back," he tells Rayon when he/she grabs some processed meat or a bag of chips for their grocery cart. But he's always the foul-mouthed, provocative macho man (even when he's too ill to get it up). His feistiness is his primary tool in fighting the establishment.
This move has a dry, no-nonsense quality that contrasts with the corn of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. But though Philadelphia may have sounded the death knell of Demme's career as a maker of hip, hilarious movies and was bourgeois and tame, it had the features of a grand, well-made, classy tear-jerker. Besides its A-listers, Hanks and Washington, it had its operatic-dance-with-the-drip-stand moment and its breathless courtroom scenes. Dallas Buyers Club hasn't anything that good. Ron Woodroof has his drip-stand scenes too, but they don't rise to the level of poetry or high drama. They're just shows of pluck or provocation. Vallée's film is most vivid in its early sequences depicting Ron's raucous lifestyle and the hostile encounters when his old buddies decide he's a "fag."
Dallas Buyer's Club, never boldly original as a movie, takes its most conventional turn in Ron's would-be romance with Dr. Saks, the physician he meets his first time in hospital, played by the bland Jennifer Garner. The Dr. Saks character does double duty. Her growing conflict with Dr. Sevard, the supervisor of the AZT trial, dramatizes the way lines are being drawn between patient advocacy and hard-line medical establishment stonewalling (no pun intended). And Ron's persistent efforts to romance her are a nod to rom-com as well as reassurance, if needed, that through it all the sexuality of his fellow AIDS sufferers hasn't rubbed off on him. His final scene is back at a rodeo. Isn't that playing up the pluck a bit? The man is, after all, dying. Yet though McConaughey's character in Mud was subtler, of all his string of recent more adventurous roles this is the one he most fully and memorably inhabits.
Dallas Buyers Club, 117 mins., which debuted at Toronto, was released in the US 22 Nov. 2013.