DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
It was a big Hollywood hit and an award-winning film about the AIDS crisis but, asks Marc Andrews, should we buy into into Dallas Buyers Club wholesale?
Without question, Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club is a good movie with great performances. It twists history to suit the story it wants to tell and, once again, it’s a movie where the straight characters are allowed to have sex but the gay ones aren’t. Matthew McConaughey is spellbinding as Ron Woodroof, a Texas electrician and rodeo man who is diagnosed with AIDS and given 30 days to live. Ron is a real hustler, a straight one at that, and not about to take his death sentence sitting down. He does his research and finds out there are experimental drugs in Mexico, Israel and France and he wants in – despite what the Food And Drug Administration (FDA) of the Reagan era believes. He forms an unlikely alliance with trannie/hooker/druggie Rayon (Jared Leto) and the two begin smuggling the drugs into the US for their paying members – hence the formation of “the Club”.
This being Hollywood, there has to be a hint of heterosexual romance and that means that Ron’s doctor is a pretty female played by Jennifer Garner. Throughout the film they flirt with each other as if every story, even one about mostly gay men dying of AIDS, needs to have a straight love affair as its backbone. Jennifer, it seems, received a memo she was acting in a TV movie – it’s almost as if she phoned in her expressions. This contrasts with Matthew and Jared’s Oscar-winning performances, which tower over her lackluster effort.
There will be other movies about the AIDS epidemic and hopefully some of these will focus on the gay heroes of the era, especially those involved in the ACT-UP movement. Their daring protests, sit-ins and unwavering dedication to getting drugs tested and approved made huge advances in changing the lethargic, resistant policies of the FDA.
McConaughey is remarkable as Ron and it’s the performance of a lifetime – right down to shedding so much weight he has the emaciated look of an ’80s AIDS sufferer. Perhaps even more remarkable is Jared Leto as Rayon who is note perfect in the role. In person, Jared has an androgynous sexual quality that is obviously what appealed to the producers and won him the role. It’s a shame he doesn’t get more screen time, but when he is on the screen you can’t take your eyes off him. Perhaps he should forget all this 30 Seconds To Mars rock band nonsense and get back to making movies. Clearly Hollywood has missed someone like him – a handsome leading man who can cross-dress, get drugged-up and still seem appealing.
This film has not been untouched by criticism. Some activists have questioned whether it would have become such big box office hit, and an award-winning one at that, if the main character had been a gay man. Dallas Buyers Club makes it very clear that Ron is homophobic and not at all interested in men. Subsequently, some of Ron’s real-life friends have stated that Ron was no homophobe and was, in fact, gay himself. Perhaps this would’ve made the film more complex and too edgy for mainstream audiences.
There’s also the question of how Ron is dead-set against anyone using the first AIDS drug, AZT, even in small doses. Many AIDS patients went on to survive the virus after being given smaller doses of the drug, not the large doses which wiped out most of those in early trials. Again, it’s probably an issue that is too complicated to feature in a movie targeted at a wider audience that presumably has little knowledge about the AIDS crisis or the era.
Dallas Buyers Club could be regarded as the natural successor to 1993’s Philadelphia, which starred Tom Hanks as a gay lawyer with AIDS, and which also won him an Oscar. It’s a worthy yet avowedly Hollywood take on the epidemic. We can only hope there’ll be more movies on this subject that don’t feel the need to stuff in pretty female doctors to make it more palatable to the multiplex.