OVP: Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Film: Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner, Denis O’Hare, Steve Zahn, Kevin Rankin

Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

Oscar History: 6 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Actor-Matthew McConaughey*, Supporting Actor-Jared Leto*, Original Screenplay, Makeup and Hairstyling*, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

There was a moment in Dallas Buyers Club, probably toward the beginning of the movie, where I realized this was not going to be an enjoyable experience.  It wasn’t when I saw the physical demands being put on Matthew McConaughey (can’t some Visual Effects artist figure out a way to not have actors gain or lose psychotic amounts of weight) nor was it when I realized the great amounts of misunderstanding and denial that the medical community used during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  Nope, it was about twenty minutes in when I finally figured out which movie Dallas Buyers Club reminded me of: Paul Haggis’s Crash.

(Real life doesn’t have spoilers…but here’s your alert anyway) In the world of cinematic criticism (my world, at least), there’s no nastier movie to compare a prestige drama to than Crash.  I kept hearkening back to Crash’s two-dimensional portrait of racism, and thought that our central figure Ron Woodroof (McConaughey) would have fit right in in that world.  At first, it honestly doesn’t seem like Ron has a single redeeming factor-he’s a racist homophobe who treats women with no respect and has little concern about his own welfare beyond what will happen right now.  In the opening scenes, we see Ron reading off that Rock Hudson is a "cocksucker" and the reaction is not that the actor has died from a horrible disease, but that he is gay (and that apparently people confuse Cary Grant and Rock Hudson).

As the film progresses, like clockwork, Ron gains an understanding that people are people and that we’re all the same and blah, blah, blah, but like Crash, there’s something missing here-nuance.  The fact that he’s not going to get to have a natural, long life is terrible, but the film attempts to equate his actions with his later redemption, and that’s just not flying for me.  It’s like when Matt Dillon’s character in Crash is a horrible racist, but the film’s yang to that argument is that he has a sick dad-the two are not cause-and-effect-related, and his character is still a horrible person (there are other examples in the film, but Dillon’s sticks out because he landed the Oscar nod amidst that cast of dozens of big name actors).  Ron claims late in the film that he wanted a family and children and a better life, but as is the case at the beginning of the film, he wasn’t living his life in a way that was going to allow that anyway.  This doesn’t mean he deserves the disease (he obviously doesn’t), but it’s hard to feel bad for a man who, were it not for a stroke of horrible luck, would have continued on with pure hate in his heart and in his actions.

I’ve read some reactions from openly gay film writers criticizing the fact that this film, the first significant theatrical film to broach the subject of AIDS since Philadelphia some twenty years ago, features a homophobic straight man at the center of the story, since obviously the early days of the AIDS struggle affected gay and bisexual men far more disproportionately than the straight population, and with this, I have to reluctantly agree.  Ron Woodroff was a real person, but you cannot tell me that there wasn’t a buyers club that was run by a gay man.  The film regularly calls back to the GLBT community (Jared Leto’s Rayon, for example), but they try to equate the struggles of Woodroff to the gay community in ways that I found insulting.  Yes, anyone affected by the disease has to deal with tragedy, but Ron Woodroff’s plight wasn’t the same as a gay person’s.  Gay men were forced to deal with this disease by themselves in the early days when the Reagan administration did next-to-nothing to stop the disease from spreading and from being treated.  Gay men were thrown out of their homes before they were infected with the disease, and it’s relatively easy to see how intolerance and prejudice and publicly shaming the community caused the disease to spread so rapidly.

Yet Vallee chose a straight male to sell tickets, to get the sympathy of the widest possible audience?  That’s insulting to all of us.  AIDS was a tragedy before it affected straight people, just like in Crash where racism is a tragedy before it affects white people.  AIDS is still thought of in hushed terms, is still a national tragedy both in need of healing and in need of a cure.  Having a man who wouldn’t have given a hoot about the disease if he hadn’t caught it be the center of a major motion picture is wrong.

I didn’t really get to the performances, and I probably should before I close here, but I’ll say I wasn’t impressed with any of them.  The best of the three main leads is McConaughey, but he never finds enough shading in-between his transformation between bigot and champion-of-the-people (and that crying scene was terrible).  Leto’s work is incredibly two-dimensional to me, and the “big scene” that everyone talks about (where he fights with his dad) falls flat in my estimation and is a biopic cliché that doesn’t feel at all special to me.  Garner gets the least colorful role, but she doesn’t add any of the complexity that she did in Juno, and we’re left with anesthesia from her (and the less said about Denis O’Hare’s Dr. Snidely Whiplash, the better).

Those were my thoughts on Dallas Buyers Club-what are yours?  Did you enjoy the film, or at least find it worthwhile?  What are your thoughts on the debate surrounding the main character?  Are you also confused by the rather shoddy science the film promotes (Peptide T has little-to-no documented effect on HIV, for starters, and AZT eventually became an effective treatment for HIV)?  And do you think McConaughey and/or Leto is about to add “Oscar Winner” to the front of their name?  Share in the comments!