Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Dallas Buyers Club (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                     1 hr & 57 min, color, 2013

Human transformations come in varied shapes and in sometimes strange contexts.  The influences that lead one to a fundamental makeover of lifestyle and world view are not always as obvious or predictable as self-help literature and sacred preachments might lead us to believe.  What made a rabid war profiteer like Oscar Schindler suddenly invest (might as well make that deplete) all his super wealth, earned by the labors of his Jewish employees, in their liberation, when he could have blown the scene, enjoyed his filthy millions for life and left them to their fate?  And what made a loathsome, whore mongering, homophobic, alcoholic, drug abusing cheat like Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), hired out as an electrician at a Dallas rodeo, into a crusader on behalf of AIDS victims nationwide in the early days of the epidemic? 

Yes, he finds himself so afflicted one day of his life in 1986 and starts illicitly trying to obtain life saving pharmaceuticals for himself any way he can get them.  And he develops a neat little black market scheme for circumventing the FDA and its misguided, inept policies of treatment, ones that eventually prove more lethal than healing.  The highly toxic AZT they are administering to their patients is killing them and Woodroof knows this.  Strangely enough he turns his enterprising into the rescue of hundreds of AIDS victims from this speedy demise and gives them a new shot at dignity, when he does not really have to for the sake of his own survival.  One day an opportunistic drug pusher and smuggler, the next a dispenser of free drugs!  Well, almost free!  Admission to this Dallas Buyers Club is $400, after which each member will get without further cost all the antivirals they need, mostly smuggled from Europe, where they are certified as safe and effective.  In short, he goes into business and leaves behind the miserable life he has previously known.  In this version of the story he even takes on as a partner a male transvestite, someone who calls himself Rayon (Jared Leto), someone he would once have treated as vermin.  What happens over time between these two is nothing less than a tale of redeeming grace.

One consequence of his work is social isolation from his former buddies in the rodeo.  His association with gay customers, particularly his partner Rayon, and the mistaken notion at the time that AIDS is something only homosexuals contract gets him branded a “faggot,” but he perseveres on just the same. 

No, Ron does not give up swearing or enjoying his booze or his inordinate, profane flares of temper, but he learns to stay sober and demands sobriety of his partner.  He even converts a young hospital physician named Eve (Jennifer Garner) to his cause.  Does he love these customers of his?  That would be hard to say, but he does practice a lot of tough love, and it pays off.  Some eventually are willing to provide his business free housing and tangible support.  Whether he could frame into words everything that is transpiring inside him is doubtful, but he catches on to it and obeys the transforming impulse.  It takes great moral courage, I think, to get up from a comfortable hospital bed to which well-meaning doctors want to confine him, where he can apparently watch the clock run out, and head for the door.  “I prefer to die with my boots on.”   To me that makes a lot of sense.  Many who benefitted from this man’s labors owe him greatly for that move. 

Of course the FDA and the IRS eventually and inevitably close in on him, confiscate his drugs and almost put him out of business, but even then he does not give up without a brave fight, taking his cause to the courts.  In this struggle he does win a small victory and loosens the grips the establishment has previously exercised upon an infected person’s options.  

Such is the essence of an exciting and most amazing bio pic.  Two few films have addressed themselves to the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the victims.  The only one that stands out in my memory is “Philadelphia” (1994), in which a professional accomplished lawyer (Tom Hanks) is stricken with the disease and sues the law firm that has fired him out of prejudice.  That one was fiction; this one is based upon an actual case history, and McConaughey takes his portrayal into realms of precision, imagination and sheer energy that is almost without equal.  He makes the character all his in every sense of the word. 

I wonder how he ever managed, after the finish of production, to shed the man and take up his regular off screen life again; I suppose he gained back the thirty pounds he deliberately lost to do the picture.  That loss of weight shows in many respects.  He looks much more shrunken in the face than he normally does and is as lean as the leanest beef from head to foot.  Such a tactic is reminiscent of Robert Deniro’s for the later scenes in “Raging Bull” over thirty years ago.  He did just the opposite of McConaughey.  To play the aging Jake Lamotta he put on heaps of weight, stuffing his gut for weeks before those scenes were shot.  We hardly recognized him he was so tubby looking and stretched wide in the face.  But he lost all the excess to go on to resume his career.  If Deniro could do that, I suspect that McConaughey could manage the restoration too.  As I recall, on the night he received his Academy Award he looked quite the healthy specimen of manhood.  Between this and his work in “Mud,” released earlier in the year and reviewed by me last August, I would say that 2013 was his year to shine without a doubt.  Both his and Leto’s Oscars are quite well deserved!

Again, though, we have a dramatic derivative from a true story.  Who is factual in the screenplay (by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallach) and who is fictional I cannot say for sure.  But the movie has more than a basis in fact, unlike “American Hustle” (the last movie I reviewed), which turns real events into the likeness of an absurd comedy with make believe people.  “Dallas Buyers Club,” as far as I can tell from on-line data, recreates the authentic likeness of a person who was once a living and breathing human being without changing his name or softening the tone.  The writing this time at least represents a true story in more earnest.     

The Director is a fifty-year-old French Canadian named Jean-Marc Vallee, who has quite a distinguished career in Canadian Movies and TV but a more meager one in American cinema, though I suspect that after his fine work on “Dallas Buyers Club” he will be showing up on this side of the border again.  The pacing and the timing of the action could not be improved.  And I am pleased that Vallee did not take us to Woodroof’s eventual deathbed.  No mawkish or sudsy conclusion!  That would have been a bad choice.  (He died in 1992, six years after being told that he had only thirty days to live.)  We depart from him when he is about to ride a bull into the arena, with only a closing inscription informing us of his eventual demise. 

I doubt if in the mid-1980s he would have been welcomed with open arms in many churches or respectable circles, but in his own intemperate way and in his own bailiwick he opened doors for so many needy people.  Whatever his personality, we have to admire the transformation he permitted himself to undergo.  


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

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