Review: ‘Dallas Buyers Club’

“Dallas Buyers Club” is a good movie, elevated by an incredible lead performance from one Mr. Matthew McConaughey. But if you’ve been paying any attention lately, you’ve noticed that ole McConaughey is no longer a joke, as he has abandoned the romantic comedies that squandered his talents and has turned in a long string of excellent performances in movie after movie after movie. As a matter of fact, his recent award nominations and wins for his role as homophobe turned entrepreneur turned AIDS activist Ron Woodroof feels like he’s getting the accolades not just for this one part but for all the movies he’s done in the last few years, because he could have easily gotten all this same attention for his amazing work in “Killer Joe,” “Magic Mike” and “Mud,” along with his lauded turned in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Bernie” and “The Lincoln Lawyer.” But hey, this role makes for a great cap to a great run of movies. And considering McConaughey has Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” next, the career resurgence of the Mac is complete. Welcome to the A-List, buddy.

So in “Dallas Buyers Club,” McConaughey plays Woodroof, who absolutely loves everything that life has to offer him, namely sex with many women, rodeos, his redneck buddies, drinking, and a dash of cocaine here and there. The movie starts with Woodroof mid-coitus, and he’s already extremely gaunt and obviously not well, and while he has sex he watches some guy get on top of a bucking bull, try to ride it, have a few seconds of success and then BOOM he watches the dude get his ass kicked by the bull, leaving him motionless on the floor. The allegory between the danger of riding bulls like that and Ron’s penchant for rampant, unprotected sex during the height of the AIDS epidemic can’t be ignored.

And of course Woodroof is as casually homophobic and racist as they come, a point hammered home very early on in the movie, which telegraphs where this movie is going to end up by about a mile. We all know, because we’ve all seen movies before, that this shit-kickin’, hate filled Texas cowboy will have his worldview shattered and it will be rebuilt in the form of a more tolerant and open-minded worldview due to his particular circumstances, but just because we know this is coming does not mean it is not interesting to watch happen. So Woodroof goes from bemoaning the “faggot disease” and even being openly hostile towards other people at AIDS support groups, to openly defending his new friends and acquaintances against bigotry and even putting himself on the line legally so that others in the same position as him could have a chance at some life-prolonging medicine.

And the medicine is at the center of this story, giving the movie its title. You see, at this time our government, in the form of the Food and Drug Administration, was in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies, as everyone was working together to make tons of money with drug tests and trials, while innumerable amounts of people suffered and died from this disease. So while other countries like France, Canada and Mexico has their own drugs that have been proven to work, they remained “unapproved” by the FDA, hence keeping them out of the hands of the people who needed them the most. And when Ron, along with a disgraced American doctor living in Mexico (and played by Griffin Dunne from “An American Werewolf in London” and “Ater Hours” fame), decide to start smuggling these drugs into America to sell to infected people, he finds himself at direct odds with the FDA, which seeks to shut him down from the get-go. And kind of hilariously, the FDA in this movie is personified by one overzealous agent who seems to have way to much of a personal stake in shutting down Ron’s unapproved medicine racket. So everytime the movie needs the governement to come in and be the bad guy, they cue the same person to come walking through the door, and it seems ridiculous that Ron would constantly interact with the same person over and over and over throughout the years.

So “Dallas Buyers Club” is really about two things: Ron’s personal journey from prejudiced asshole to AIDS folk hero, and the fight to get proper medication to the sick in a timely and non-money grubbing manner. The problem with this is the fact that this movie doesn’t really get too deep into the whole FDA and pharamceutical companies making money on the backs of the sick angle and really just pays it all obvious lip service. Like the scene early on in the movie in which a Big Pharma Representative is making a sales pitch for new-at-the-time drug AZT to an admin board at a hospital, the one doctor with a conscience (Jennifer Garner) notices that the Rep has a gold watch, and it is obvious to her (and to the audience) that this guy cares more about making money than making people better. So why did we need the follow up scene, in which she complains to her superior (Denis O’Hare) that the Pharma Rep was flashing his gold Rolex? We know she is aware of this and against it and we know the other hospital adminstrators don’t care because they all want gold Rolex watches as well so did we really need a character in the movie to say the obvious out loud?

And so the movie goes, as it starts out as “Ron becomes a better person thanks to a disease” and then morphes into a David versus Goliath story, a band of misfit outsiders sticking together and fighting their oppressors, with the implication that the government cares more about money than they do about curing the sick. And really, does that surpirse anyone? I guess that’s the problem with the movie in the end, as this story doesn’t really tell us much that we didn’t know already. When it is boiled down to its basic component parts, it is a very rote and typical story, but when the details get filled in and then brought to life by people like McConaughey and Jared Leto, then the movie gets elevated to something bigger (as evidenced by its Best Picture nomination for the 2013-2014 Academy Awards).

So this is a good movie, not great, but indeed filled with great acting and some interesting details and it is definitely worth seeing for the McConaughey alone.

P.S. People who say that McConaughey got a Best Actor nomination for his work here because he lost a ton of weight and he’s playing someone dying from AIDS (which is seen as award catnip for the Academy) obviously have not seen this movie because there is much more to the performance than a crash diet and pretending like he’s dying, that’s for sure.