Login
Here is a film that is trying to be two different ones at once, and ends up being merely adequate versions of both. If it wasn’t for Matthew McConaughey’s impressive and strong central performance, Dallas Buyers Club would fold under its own weight and confusion over just which type of movie this is. What wins out more, unfortunately, is Hollywood feel-good hogwash about a scrappy little guy fighting against a large goliath entity. The better film is the character study of a leathery rascal who looks imminent death in the face and says, in a Texan drawl, “Not today.”
Long ago I had written off McConaughey as a tanned himbo – a nice body, charming accent and not much else to offer up. While I thought he was the weakest of the three leads in Bernie that doesn’t mean I thought he was bad by any stretch, he was just stuck with the straight-man role. But I bring up Bernie because it was the first time I had ever noticed the actor hiding inside of the man who had made such terrible choices as How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past. And he has continued on with that hot streak – a small role in The Wolf of Wall Street is perfectly oily as he’s the man who brings DiCaprio’s character into the drugs-and-sex hedonism and underworld of Wall Street trading, and he’s gotten great reviews for his work in Magic Mike, Mud, The Paperboy and Killer Joe, films which I unwisely avoided due to his name being attached and having unfair expectations over what exactly they are and his having rarely, if ever, displayed any versatility or depth as an actor.
But here we are, with McConaughey as the front-runner to win Best Actor at the Oscars, and me not only impressed with his work, but rather hoping he’ll actually win the damn thing and continue on with these challenging roles and for-the-art subject matter. It’s damn fine performance, and not just for the drastic weight loss. His skeletal frame is unnerving to stare at, but it’s the way he refuses to make his character easy to love, preferring to keep him a bit of a rascal and fighter even as the film is charging towards a Hollywood-style redemption arc. He does great work here, and anything that works effectively in the film is because of the graceful balancing act he does with the role.
But Dallas Buyers Club is loaded with problems. Denis O’Hare and Jennifer Garner turn in fine work, but their characters feel entirely superfluous. An abortive sub-plot sees a semi-romance between Garner and McConaughey that goes nowhere slowly, while she’s also involved with a tenuous friendship with Jared Leto’s doomed trans-woman Rayon.
Being entirely inconsequential to the plot is one thing, but creating a trans character to serve only as the spring board for a homophobe’s transition into being less of an asshole is just condescending. Leto is fine in the role, but he doesn’t do anything truly extraordinary with it besides lose a lot of weight, cry on command and toss off sassy quips. Rayon is given no interior life, no backstory, no reasoning for existing aside from providing hollow and false moments, the kind that present the lead character as more likeable, like when McConaughey forces a former friend into giving Leto a handshake. It rings entirely false as a scene. Rayon feels like a character from another era, the hetero’s goofy sidekick who is an outlandish other, but basically a harmless eunuch who exits the story once the hero has become softer and more tolerant.
This doesn’t even begin to describe the problem of hetero-washing McConaughey’s character, turning him from a bisexual cowboy into a homophobic heterosexual asshole that can be redeemed. This brand of story-telling is basically an off-shoot of “White Savior” hokum. Out of all the stories to tell about AIDS, its enduring ugly legacy, the gay community and redemption why change so much from the real one? Why tell it this way? An even worse offense is to pretend that there were only small pockets at this time, when ACT-UP was organizing mass protests. So much of the truth is left out of Dallas Buyers Club that it’s both shocking and not. Well, I guess there’s a pretty solid reason that this film was somehow, inexplicably nominated for Best Original Screenplay. I have got to say that while I rarely expect Hollywood to craft a complicated and unflinching look at any historical subject without changing whole cloth much of the truth, I rarely expect this much revisionist history and pigeon-holing into tidy story conventions.
