by Joseph Rossi
Dallas Buyers Club is a great film. It’s one that stirs the soul and shows the world that great things happen when you have a gifted director, a terrific script and brave performers.
This film reinvents the career of Matthew McConaughey. He pulls out all the stops as Ron Woodroof, small time rodeo star/electrician who finds out, after numerous sexual escapades, that he has HIV. He plays Woodroof as a truly cocky, sleazy, happy go lucky type of guy; a booze hound, cokehead and womanizer. When his world does indeed crumble around him, McConaughey emits a sense of despair and loneliness that I haven’t seen any actor do in a long time. His co-stars are all top notch as well. Jennifer Garner does some good work as a sympathetic doctor and Jared Leto comes out of hiding and gives a performance of a lifetime as Rayon, a fellow HIV patient and soon to be partner to in Woodroof’s plan. The plan, which becomes the Dallas Buyers Club, is Ron’s ingenious attempt to make quick cash with unapproved drugs for HIV patients. By offering his clients memberships to his “club”, he is not truly selling his merchandise and operates under the eye of the law. Become a member for a few hundred bucks, drugs are free. Easy enough.
In my opinion, director Jean-Marc Vallee’s film Crazy is the best Quebec film ever made. Many felt the same way since Hollywood came calling soon after that. He toiled as all directors do for a while until the right project came along. Dallas Buyers Club is that project. Like his hometown peers that made the jump to American films, Vallee brings a different style to the table. One can tell that the film isn’t directed by a Hollywood veteran or even an American at that. There is a different sensibility with this film, much like Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners. The techniques aren’t obvious. The handheld camera roves around looking around corners; digging into the frequent close ups of its subjects and reflects their sense of pain, loss and at sometimes, joy. His use of sound and score is impressive; Woodruff’s frequent lapses into silence are eerily realistic and painful. Most impressively, he doesn’t let the movie fall into a pool of sugary sentiment. Whereas most movies would wear their hearts on their sleeve and have us cry at a moment’s notice, the filmmaker wisely eschews any glorified speechifying and tear inducing set ups that would be relevant here.
I believed that Matthew McConaughey hit a career high with Magic Mike, Bernie and Mud. Here, he just expands his filmography into the stratosphere. Watch this film. It is one of the year’s best.
