People go to the movies for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they want to see an inspiring story, or gaze in wonder at breathtaking cinematography. Sometimes the viewer is dragged to the theater by a significant other, taking a cinematic bullet for the relationship. Solid reasons all. Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club is a performance movie. You’re buying a ticket to be shocked and amazed by the very sight of Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. Beyond the physical transformations, what the two men do on screen transcends the craft of acting. It’s something more akin to magic.
McConaughey stars as Ron Woodruff, an electrician and sometimes-bull rider who is diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1985. The first time McConaughey appears, I thought, Holy shit, he looks like he’s about to die. Fitting, since he’s almost immediately at the doctor’s office being told he’s got one month to live. “Nothing can kill Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he sneers, while liberally sprinkling in the word “faggot” (Ron takes particular exception to the idea that he caught the disease through gay sex) and threatening to fight the physician.
The diagnosis is correct, even if the amount of time he has left is not. After a brief bit of denial, Ron gets smart about his predicament. He researches the disease, gets clean and travels to Mexico where he meets Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne), a specialist in alternative therapies not approved in the U.S. The doc warns him about AZT, which he regards as poison and which Ron is taking as part of a clinical trial administered by a well-meaning doctor (Jennifer Garner) that Ron is crushing on. Vass instead suggests a regimen of herbs and chemicals that the FDA considers off-limits. The cocktail works.
Being a natural-born hustler and sensing a business opportunity, Ron is soon smuggling large amounts of the stuff back into the U.S. The problem is that even though there is a ripe potential market for such things, the consumers are mostly gay and Ron is a raging homophobe. Enter Rayon (Jared Leto), a transsexual Ron meets while at the hospital. Though Ron is at first repulsed by Rayon, the two are well matched, eventually forming an unlikely business partnership in which Rayon deals with the clients and Ron runs the business side of things.
That business runs afoul of the FDA, represented primarily by the character of Barkley (played by veteran actor Michael O’Neill). As Ron and Rayon launch their “buyers club,” which circumvents the law by charging only for a membership in the club and not for the drugs themselves, Barkley keeps popping up to shut them down. He also becomes the target of Ron’s rage, which provides McConaughey multiple opportunities to rant self-righteously against institutions that would deny sick people access to chemicals that seem to work, even if they aren’t “approved.” The juxtaposition of his frail, sickly frame and the thunder of his performance is mesmerizing.
To be fair, the plotting of Dallas Buyers Club is somewhat by the numbers — little guy fights the power, pays a huge personal price and is eventually vindicated — but the relationship between these characters is anything but. I am struck days later by how much the Ron/Rayon relationship has stayed with me. Though never physical in nature, it’s far deeper than most movie romances. By comparison, both men also have friendly relationships with Garner’s AZT-peddling doc, but it’s much more standard issue. (I found Garner lacking, but to be fair, I blame the underwritten character more than the actress. Plus, it was going to be hard for anyone to compete with the thespian fireworks being set off by the guys.)
Dallas Buyers Club is getting plenty of well-deserved Oscar buzz. As we head into the last six week’s of 2013 it’ll be interesting to see if anyone can top the performances by McConaughey and Leto. So far, I haven’t seen it.
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2013.