This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)
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11 February
This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)
* Contains spoilers * : Best seen cold – you might even avoid the poster, which seems to suggest that it is about a car auction – so quit reading now
A harsh generalization, but a film that needs you to know what it is about beforehand is a failure – this one starts off where it ends, but rodeo is not what it is about, but a man who keeps losing consciousness and ends up in hospital with news that he is quick to reject as a mistake. He is quick to reject it, but not slow to find out all about it – we had taken him for some sort of a hick, with his trailer, so it is a surprise to find him, when his eyes will co-operate, deep in research down at the library.
Ron Woodroff may not have been quite like this, but Matthew McConaughey creates a compelling figure (and, as a fleeting headline suggests, he may have had access to Woodroff’s diary), even to the extent of being stick-insect thin at the start of the film. Yes, he is HIV+, and he is even told that he has full-blown AIDS and just thirty days to live, but that is where Woodroff’s considerable will to win, which had him excitedly take bets and then scarper when he lost the bet, begins to kick in.
Dallas Buyers Club : A definite and strong whole, but with elements reminiscent of Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Philadelphia, Lorenzo's Oil...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 10, 2014
The hospital will be one of our ports of call, and the four most important people are there together right at the start : Woodroff, Dr Sevard (Denis O’Hare), his junior doctor Eve (Jennifer Garner – IMDb can be a bit short on recording names, which one has heard in films, but does not recall), and Rayon (Jared Leto)*. (Everyone else, relatively speaking, is on the periphery of the narration, including Dr Vass, Richard Barkley, and Woodroff’s mate on the police force (ditto IMDb).)
The question that the film poses is this one : does one see more of Woodroff’s character, and beyond the man who calls Rayon (and others) a faggot when trying to be friendly at the hospital, because we spend more time with him, or because he is fighting the rules and the warped system to save his own life (and that of anyone else who can afford to pay to keep him afloat), and that brings out the best in him ?
When we first see him, he is using the charged and close atmosphere of a pen at the rodeo to have sex with two girls, which – as we are judging creatures – gives a negative indication of his attitudes, not least when he runs off with the stake-money (in a very quick-thinking way). And then he keeps collapsing, ends up in Dallas Mercy (ironic, as it turns out), and is confronted with the level of his T-cells and other test-results.
The incidental meeting - because of being in neighbouring beds - with drag-queen Rayon (for which Leto deserves an Academy Award for best supporting actor), whom he does not understand or want to be touched by, but plays cards with (pitiably badly, according to Rayon), is his prompt to realize that they have common needs, and to learn about the trials of the drug AZT. The dynamic of the film is not so much to make us approve of Woodroff in himself, but as battling the unfair and self-interested regulation of the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) on behalf the members of the buyers club that Rayon and he set up :
We admire him because he takes the risk of seeking to do all that he can for them, because it also helps save his life, but it is individually how he softens towards Rayon, and how Eve finds herself more and more out of step with her superior (and valuing what Woodroff is doing), that the film has its emotional core. Seeing him, with much neck and no small amount of humour, pretending to Barkley to be a priest, and spinning a yarn about how much medication he needs to take, is priceless, and the film is unobtrusively laced through with all sorts of comic touches.
A very different film, although it has the same transformational account of Joe Miller coming to change his view of Andrew Beckett, is Philadelphia (1993), because of how the film ‘feels’. Despite having HIV and AIDS in common, the parallel feels even less close than with Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), based on Manuel Puig’s novel, because, as already suggested, Leto’s portrayal gives a potentially weighed-down film the right amount of buoyancy. Yet in no flimsy or tokenistic way, and with the crushing poignancy of the scene when he goes to see his father at the bank and moves him to pity, not least by how he refers to Woodroff, an origin that he casually passes off, in handing over cash to Woodroff, as having cashed in a policy.
A really affecting moment in Dallas Buyers Club when Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) and Rayon (Jared Leto) shake hands, then embrace.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 9, 2014
Where, despite opportunistic Woodroff showing that he will happily have sex with one of the members of the club because he knows that he cannot infect her, we might feel that we are heading for an anodyne romance is with Dr Eve, but the film seems aware of that being too pat, and the closest that we really get to corny smooth-talking is when he buys her dinner - and that is fun, since it is so knowing. Medically, she sees that what he is doing is better than the AZT regime, and is won over by it, even if the FDA, changing the rules, stymie things. The politics of that, if not the subject of a film or two already, soon will be…
This is not a feel-good film, although accepting Rayon and obliging a former drinking buddy to shakes his hand is one of those moments where one embraces the feeling behind what Woodroff has done, and cringes at the means - just as much as his stealing Dr Eve’s pad of prescriptions, and how he responds on being challenged by Barkley that the names on the prescriptions are all members of the Dallas Cowboys. Yet, far more profoundly than a film like Gravity (2013)**, it is about adversity, the human spirit, and the capacity to reach out to others.
End-notes
* Plus it was really interesting to spot the name Griffin Dunne (as Dr Vass) in the credits…
** #GravityIsGravy on Twitter (the film lacks ‘it’).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
