Jean-Marc Vallée (2013)

There’s nothing much wrong with Dallas Buyers Club except that it’s all about one thing and that this seems to reflect less a single-minded intensity than a thin screenplay (by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack). The film is based on the life of a Texan called Ron Woodroof who, in 1985, was diagnosed with AIDS and given thirty days to live. Ron is an electrician and part-time rodeo cowboy, outraged not only by the death sentence but also that he’s got the ‘gay disease’. (Promiscuous but definitely heterosexual, he remembers having had unprotected sex with an intravenous drugs user.) Ron learns from a doctor at the Dallas hospital where he’s treated about an antiviral medication called AZT, the only AIDS drug approved by the Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA) for testing on humans. Ron gets hold of some AZT. His health worsens but he thinks he therefore needs more of the stuff. When he drives to a Mexican hospital to get it, he’s told there, by a doctor who’s had his American licence revoked, that AZT itself is a killer. The doctor prescribes instead ddC and the protein Peptide T, neither of which is FDA-approved. Ron’s health improves – he survives beyond thirty days. He begins selling ddC/Peptide T on the street, in partnership with a transgendered man called Rayon (formerly Raymond). They set up the Dallas Buyers Club for the benefit not only of themselves but of other AIDS sufferers too. Rayon eventually dies, after being hospitalised and given AZT while Ron is in Mexico getting new supplies of Peptide T. By now, Ron is no longer homophobic – in the company of gays, he’s become positively sympathetic. As Peptide T gets increasingly difficult to acquire, Ron takes the FDA to court, seeking the legal right to take the protein, which is still not approved. He loses the case but wins a moral victory – and an expression of compassionate regret by the presiding judge that he doesn’t have the legal tools to do more to help. A legend at the end of the film explains that the FDA subsequently allowed Ron to take Peptide T for his personal use. He died of AIDS in 1992, seven years later than predicted.

There are few changes of pace or emphasis: this may express the confidence in his material of the director, Jean-Marc Vallée, who shows self-discipline in keeping obvious emotional highlights to a minimum. But the effect is oddly unexciting and because this is, after all, a movie formula – the tale of a crusader and his moral development through the embrace of his cause – the carefully unadorned treatment is rather futile. There’s common ground with Erin Brockovich and, rather more curiously, with Milk – although Dallas Buyers Club isn’t as good a film as either of those. Ron Woodroof takes on the PDA as Erin Brockovich did an energy corporation. In Milk, the gay characters’ talk and mannerisms made their political crusade distinctive and supplied an antidote to its potentially pompous aspect. Ron’s homophobia, unpleasant as it is, does something equivalent in Dallas Buyers Club: it’s a counterpoint to the nobility of the struggle against AIDS at the heart of the story and it makes for some sharp one-liners. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, its characterisation of Woodroof makes him ‘rougher than he actually was’. The real Woodroof, ‘according to those who knew him’, was ‘”outrageous, but not confrontational” and not as obviously anti-gay earlier in his life’. He liked rodeos but ‘he never rode any bulls himself’. If all this is right (although the article doesn’t make clear in what ways he was ‘outrageous’), the dramatic licence is to be welcomed. Without the characteristics that the script invents or exaggerates, Ron Woodroof would risk becoming as undernourished dramatically as Matthew McConaughey had to be actually in order to play the role.

You have to look beyond the weight loss to decide whether McConaughey’s performance is as astonishing as it’s cracked up to be. There’s no doubt he’s visually extraordinary. He lost forty-seven pounds and the resulting image – thanks to the sleek, perma-tanned way McConaughey used to look – is that of a wasted Marlboro Man. I found myself particularly admiring some of the quieter bits in his portrait of Ron Woodroof – like a dinner with Eve Saks, the sympathetic woman doctor from the Dallas hospital, or Ron’s reaction to the news of Rayon’s death (a light goes out in McConaughey’s eyes) or the guttural sounds that come out of him at one point, as Ron sits alone in his car. His playing of the homecoming scene after Ron has lost his law suit against the FDA is very fine, even if this kind of heartwarming lost-the-legal-battle-but-won-the-moral-war climax feels too familiar. More largely, Matthew McConaughey is highly effective at suggesting someone whose life acquires a new focus and energy through adversity. A bit like McConaughey’s own career: you’re always conscious not only of his acting but also of his excitement at playing a role that neither he nor the audience could have imagined his doing until very recently. He’s now clear favourite for the Oscar (although I wouldn’t rule out Leonardo DiCaprio).

Jared Leto is sweeping the Supporting Actor awards board in America for his playing of Raymond/Rayon. This could be for the wrong – spectacular casting against type – reasons but Leto shows plenty of emotional variety and has absorbed the gestures and personality of Rayon very fully. You’re never so aware of this as in the scene in which Raymond is dressed in men’s clothes for a begging-for-funds interview with his disapproving father. Raymond is a reduced human being here; he’s realised as a woman in a way he can’t be as a man. Jennifer Garner does well as Eve Saks, although the writing of the character – who’s an invention – is uninspired. There are good performances in smaller roles from Griffin Dunne as the struck-off doctor in Mexico and Steve Zahn as Ron’s police officer friend.

8 February 2014