Once upon a time Matthew McConaughey was considered something of a joke of an actor. He went from being a promising talent who earned a lot of praise for his work in A Time to Kill to being the prototypical Hollywood leading man hack pretty quickly. Starring in stupid action movies and cringe-inducing romantic comedies for a decade or so is what did it. Ever since The Lincoln Lawyer came out in 2011 things have changed though. The urge to be an A-list star seems to be out the window as far as McConaughey is concerned, because all he’s been doing lately is meaty, fairly strange roles in movies made by talented, fairly strange directors. The results have been so positive that Dallas Buyers Club is now entering theaters with quite a bit of anticipation proceeding it. We’re deep into the McConaughey comeback at this point, so the world is waiting with baited breath to see how he does when playing a really challenging role that required a physical transformation and quite a bit of commitment on his part.
The role in question is that of Ron Woodroof, a real life electrician and amateur bull rider who was diagnosed with HIV back in 1985, when the disease was still new and there was still a lot of misunderstandings as to the nature of it. When he was first diagnosed, Woodroof was given only 30 days to live, which wasn’t a ridiculous diagnoses to give him seeing as all of the drugs that could have improved his condition were unavailable in the US at the time due to the FDA dragging their feet in approving them for use. Not one to take bad news lying down, Woodroof soon saw himself traveling over the border to Mexico, where he encountered a cocktail of drugs that did quite a bit to restore his constitution—and suddenly an idea for a business was born. Smuggling AIDS medication into the US in 1985, while a profitable enterprise, was a bit of a challenge for a guy who was as homophobic as Woodroof was at the time though, seeing as the vast majority of the afflicted who needed his services were gay males. And thus we have an interesting character swept up in an interesting story, which is the basic building blocks for an interesting movie.
Despite the intrigue inherent in Woodroof’s life, however, most of the attention that Dallas Buyers Club receives is probably not going to come from its story. Instead, it’s likely to come from McConaughey’s performance, and specifically how much weight he lost in order to play an AIDS patient. The observation that any time an attractive Hollywood star alters their appearance in order to appear less attractive for a role they’re pretty much guaranteed to win an Oscar is one that’s been made so many times that it’s a cliché at this point, but it’s important to remember that clichés become clichés only after a precedent has been sent. The truth is, McConaughey is likely going to get a lot of awards attention for this performance, and much of the talk surrounding the film is likely going to be about what his chances are at picking up some golden statues. In reality though, who the heck cares about all of that Oscar crap? What we should be talking about is, apart from the physical transformation, is McConaughey actually good in the role?
To get to the point, yes he is, he’s actually quite good. This is McConaughey we’re talking about, after all. This guy has been on fire lately. What’s especially impressive about his performance of a curmudgeonly, AIDS-suffering, former bull rider here though is that Woodroof was such an unlikable cuss that McConaughey had a lot of work to do in order to keep you on his side, and he manages to maintain your sympathies all the way through. Woodroof is the sort of guy who, once he gets humbled by staring death in the face and then comes back from the brink due to a miracle discovery, can’t even be content to acquire the drugs that will lengthen his life and be thankful for the opportunity. No, he has to then press his luck by buying extreme quantities of the meds and trying to get rich quick by smuggling them over the border. There’s nothing at all philanthropic about his plan, he doesn’t care about the other people who need the meds to live (he continues to hurl invectives in their direction for quite a while, as a matter of fact), he’s just a lazy scumbag who will take any shortcut that comes his way. And he stays that way for the vast majority of the film. If McConaughey wasn’t able to adequately project the panic and the pain that existed behind his stubbornness, it would have been a real chore to get through it all.
As far as The Dallas Buyers Club goes though, patience does pay off. Once Woodroof strikes up a business partnership and a pseudo-friendship with a cross-dressing patient named Rayon (Jared Leto) who he meets during a hospital stay, things actually start getting good. What develops between the two isn’t really a cherished friendship, or even really a successful partnership—this isn’t a buddy cop film—but it is a gradual recognition of the humanity that connects all of us and the arbitrary nature of the prejudices that keep us apart. Gay, straight, man, woman, what are all of us other than vulnerable balls of need and pain? It should be said that Leto is really good in the film too. He’s playing a character who’s a big, loud personality, and there’s a definite danger in that. It’s really difficult for most actors to completely transform into another type for a role like this and not always appear to be transparently performing, but Leto is able to bring quite a bit of authenticity to everything he does. He even gets a big scene where his character confronts his estranged father to show off, and he knocks it out of the park. Plus, you know, he got pretty skinny too, so you can probably double up your expectations for how much Oscar talk you’re going to have to endure regarding this one.
The other place where Woodroof’s character develops and the film becomes interesting is in the subplot of his building of his drug-peddling empire. Seemingly through sheer survival instinct alone, Woodroof goes from being a fairly worthless layabout to being a proactive and educated businessman whose knowledge and research into AIDS medications rivaled most of the doctors and FDA people who he came into conflict with. Watching him change and grow in that way lends the film quite a bit of narrative momentum, and makes sure that your interest is maintained all the way through.
One of the few places where the film stumbles is in the inclusion of the doctor character played by Jennifer Garner though. The only reason she even really seems to exist here is to service the plot in a small way and to make sure that they didn’t make a movie without a female character, and for the complete lack of payoff that comes from her character’s conclusion, it doesn’t make much sense at all why she eats up so much screen time. The scene where she and Woodroof go on a dinner date is especially egregious. There isn’t going to be a deeper relationship that gets formed between them, their interactions don’t tell us any more about their characters, so what was the point? The time spent developing this relationship would have been much better spent further developing the Woodroof/Rayon relationship, which is really the heart of the film. Of course, Garner’s character was most likely included because this woman really did exist in Woodroof’s life, even though her role in the story could have been accomplished in a million other, neater ways, which is one of the main detriments of making a dramatic film that’s also trying to service a true story.
Which brings us to the real problem here. Ninety percent of Dallas Buyers Club works as an effective drama that focuses on the life of an interesting character, but in the end the biopic nature of the story ends up taking over and things start to become more of a journalistic look into the life of a real man who played an important role in the real story of AIDS treatment. Instead of finding a poetic place to leave Woodroof, the film starts to feel far too obligated to fill us in on all of the details of his life, right to the very end, and it subsequently becomes more of a tedious news story than it started out as. At the point where additional information starts to be given to us by text that appears on the screen, the film goes completely off the rails. Thankfully, none of this stuff starts creeping in until the very end though, so you can walk away from the film with the impression that what you saw was pretty strong overall. And the McConaughey comeback train keeps rolling on.
