Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Set in the mid-80s, Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodroof, a Texan electrician, womaniser, drug-user and rodeo bull rider who contracts the AIDS virus, and is given one month to live (This is 10 minutes into the film. Movies are fun!). Fired, evicted, and now friendless due to homophobic fear and ignorance, Ron (who in the film is aggressively straight and quite homophobic himself) illegally obtains an experimental drug named AZT for his treatment. That’s because the hospital where Ron was diagnosed is running a trial on AZT, but half the patients get a placebo, in order for the test to work, which isn’t good enough for Ron. Unfortunately, that avenue eventually closes up and it doesn’t seem to be working anyway, so Ron goes to Mexico and meets a disbarred doctor (Griffin Dunne) who tells him that AZT is poisonous and prescribes vitamins and drugs not approved by the American FDA. We now cut to several months later and Ron is much improved. Being an enterprising fellow, he sees dollar signs in bringing in the not approved (but not exactly illegal) drugs from Mexico and selling them to HIV patients in the US. When his clearly compassionate doctor (Jennifer Garner) finds out that most of her patients are now suddenly turning up for drugs at the “Dallas Buyers Club”, and that another patient, transgendered Rayon (Jared Leto) is helping Ron run the business, she’s obviously not happy. However, she has also started to notice that AZT is hurting more than helping, something her superiors are uninterested in hearing. Steve Zahn plays a cop who always tries to look out for Ron, even when the prick doesn’t necessarily deserve it.

 

Although it was one of the critical darlings of 2013, I must say that this rather familiar and unsurprising film from director Jean-Marc Vallee (“Café de Flore”, and “The Young Victoria”, which I found greatly disappointing) and writers Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, owes a whole helluva lot to the Oscar-winning performance by Matthew McConaughey, by far the best performance of his career. Otherwise it’s pretty derivative of the excellent “Philadelphia” (a film that some people mistook for playing it safe, but was actually not aimed at the converted. It still amazes me that people didn’t get it), but with McConaughey playing both Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington rolled into one. Jared Leto, meanwhile, won an Oscar for basically playing William Hurt in “Kiss of the Spider Woman”, a showy part that Leto proves far less compelling in than does Mr. McConaughey in his role (Ironic that I’ve read comments by Leto criticising Hurt’s performance). Good supporting work by Steve Zahn, and especially Griffin Dunne’s best work in decades. You’ll wish they were in the film a lot more. Zahn in particular, I feel was deprived of just one more scene, I think, to really make his character’s connection with Ron fleshed out.

 

Jennifer Garner is pitch-perfect casting as well. You need a warm-hearted actress to play someone who is professionally meant to be clinical, but also have enough compassion to separate her from her colleagues/superiors. Well-done there, whoever came up with the idea of casting her. But it’s definitely McConaughey’s film, this one. Unlike Christian Bale in “The Fighter”, McConaughey doesn’t let his emaciated look call attention to itself as an actor losing/gaining weight to win an Oscar, he’s entirely inside this character’s skin from moment one. More than the physicality, he’s just simply right for this cocky, hard-drinkin’, man-whorin’ bull-rider character. Leto, by comparison, lets his showier role get the better of him, and is simply delivering a performance. It’s an entertaining one, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a performance…and not an original one, either.

 

Once the film really starts to focus on the drug angle, the film becomes much better and starts to develop its own identity away from “Philadelphia” (Which is good, because we’ve hopefully advanced a little bit since that 1993 film anyway), as does the McConaughey character, for the most part. He starts off as self-serving and homophobic, but if he’s dying, what good is money to him? So obviously, there’s a lot more going on inside that character than simply profiteering off of some dying gays, and that complex part of him is somewhat original and interesting. Hell, I’m not even sure I approve of what he was doing with the buyers’ club, not entirely anyway. But Leto’s character (fictional, by the way) stays the same, and whereas I was quite emotional during “Philadelphia”, this one left me a bit cold. It’s not the potentially fascinating subject matter or McConaughey’s performance at fault here, but this one’s more interesting than moving or sad. Also, the treatment of the doctors here becomes less even-handed the longer the film goes on. However, I must say, it’s still far more even-handed than a lot of others seem to be suggesting. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t entirely approving of what Woodroof was doing. He had the best of intentions (eventually anyway) and was clearly acting out of frustration with the medical profession’s stubbornly slow uptake on these drugs. However, it’s all well and good to say that the drugs the doctors were handing out were harmful rather than helpful, but with everyone going to McConaughey for his supposedly more helpful drugs (not approved by the FDA), the much-needed reliable data from medical tests is made much more difficult. So I was certainly conflicted about that.

 

Much more than the portrayal of the doctors in the film, I was annoyed at some of the changes to the true story the film is based on, to be honest. There’s some debate over it, but some who knew the real-life Woodroof say he wasn’t homophobic, and indeed was bisexual himself. But as there’s some conjecture on these views, I can’t really tax the film for it. It just irks me, because if true, that’s an awful lot of dramatic license to have taken. He wasn’t even a bull-rider. I’m not too sure what the hell that change was all about.

 

Not one of the strongest recommendations of 2013, but it just gets there in the end, and McConaughey has never been better. It’s not a bad film at all, derivative at times, and overrated, but worth seeing.

 

Rating: B-