Two thin men, one flawless film I
There is no fat on the lead actors, nor on the lean, lively script, writes Sue de Groot
T is hard to find fault with Dallas Buyers Club. There is an apostrophe missing from its title, which is annoying, but other than that I’d call this a film almost without flaw. Which is quite astonishing when you consider that it: (a) involves a complicated narrative about the early treatment of HIV; (b) is rather long; (c) stars an anorexic version of Matthew McConaughey, who starved himself for the role till he had the sex appeal of a syphilitic chihuahua.
If the film is almost flawless, McConaughey’s performance is entirely so, and he is almost certain to win tonight’s Best Actor Oscar — unless someone else does.
Jared Leto, who plays a man playing a woman with panache and poignancy, may also sashay onto the stage, hopefully in a miniskirt. He and McConaughey might be scarily thin in this film, but together they cause a fat chemical reaction not seen between a screen couple since Jack Lemmon met Walter Matthau.
Not that this is in any way a comedy. McConaughey is Ron Woodroof, a wiry Texan electrician who discovers he is HIV-positive. The film does not tell how he contracted the virus, although there is a suggestive flashback to a syringe. Apparently the real Woodroof also didn’t say, or didn’t know.
Leto is a transsexual called Rayon who becomes Woodroof’s business partner and object of constant derision. The film paints Woodroof as a potty-mouthed, rodeo-riding homophobe, but since its release friends have claimed he was polite, bisexual, and never set his rump on a steer. It doesn’t really matter — bigotry and bisexuality often share a bed, and all these are merely devices to dram up what might otherwise have been a didactic documentary.
Once past a patch of rip-roaring, cokesnorting, group-sexing denial, Woodroof starts to study his illness. This is 1985, Rock Hudson has recently died and the stigma attached to HIV is the size of a giant redwood. The drug AZT, being tested in control-group studies, is not available to the public. Woodroof gets some by illicit means, then meets a disbarred doctor who convinces him that AZT is toxic and there are better ways to treat Aids symptoms.
He gets mad at drug companies, the gov- ernment and doctors — even a pretty one played by Jennifer Garner — then gets even by starting the buyers’ club of the title (and you thought it was about American football).
Soon hundreds of HIV-positive people are paying membership fees and receiving medication imported by Woodroof from Mexico, China and other places. The drugs are unlicensed but not illegal, and technically he is not selling them, so he gets away with this — until he doesn’t.
McConaughey’s performance turns this legal wrangle into a thriller. Whether his strutting skinny cowboy accurately represents the real Woodroof is not the point. The point is the intense subtlety and remarkable lack of exposition with which the film makes you fall in love with him.