Riding the bull

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2014)

The contrast could hardly be any greater: In the opening of Dallas Buyers Club, the viewer enters the rough macho world of American bull riding, a world inhabited unashamedly by people from the lower social strata of the "lone-star state". Next we are in a hospital: friendly, white, anti-septic, efficient. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) belongs to the former universe: a bull riding (although we only get to see him at that at the very end), womanizing, gambling homophobic redneck of the worst kind. Thrown into the latter environment and confronted with an HIV diagnosis, he has to try and cope with a world he doesn't know – that of the peak of the AIDS scare in 1985 – one in which he finds himself weak, facing his own death, in which he's ostracized by his former buddies and shares his fate with those he despises, such as the transsexual Rayon (Jared Leto in a rare return to what the 30 Seconds to Mars front man still does best: acting). After initial denial, Woodruff stubbornly sets out to defy the doctors' prognosis that he only has 30 days left to live. He goes to Mexico, finds alternative drugs and – back in gambling and money-making mode – starts a business selling those drugs which have not been approved by U.S. authorities yet, fighting the systems and reluctantly having to question his own beliefs.
Dallas Buyers Club is McConaughey's film. Not only did he lose over 20 kg to play the emaciated Woodruff, he becomes his character in the best possible sense. McConaughey starts out as an entirely unsympathetic and rather despicable homophobic and misogynistic man in dirty jeans and T shirt and he follows his character's development into a conscientious campaigner, savvy businessman and caring friend without entirely turning him inside out. The redneck is still there in the end, the macho, too, the swagger having become perhaps even greater. McConaughey and director Jean-Marc Vallée avoid any Saul to Paul cliché, they show a man who does what he needs to survive a little longer, whose selfishness results in helping others and ultimately something resembling compassion, whose gigantic ego enables him to fight against the odds and become a completely unlikely hero. Who has nothing heroic about him: McConaughey does not idolize Woodruff, he does not explain him – he is there, plain and simple, in all his ugliness, meanness, and prejudice. He is no saint but a fully fleshed-out human: very flawed but with an almost obscene will to live. The subtlety with which McConaughey depicts his character, the uncompromising way with which he inhabits him, carry the film and make it a convincing plea for humaneness and compassion with the conviction that it can be found anywhere and in any place. Dallas Buyers Club reminds the viewer that it is not the "good people" alone who affect change, that progress can start with anyone.
Vallée's best move was to give the film entirely to McConaughey, aided by a cast headed by Leto whose portrayal of Rayon between self-assured pride and broken despair should earn him more than the Oscar nomination he already has (as does McConaughey). Vallée focuses on Woodruff, gives him a carefully designed environment of mid-1980s shabbiness, dynamic photography that reflects the unsteadiness of this driven man, and pale washed-out colors placing him clearly in a world and time when fear brought out the worst in otherwise seemingly civilized people. The discriminatory atmosphere of U.S. society at the time is hinted at, as is the questionable role the authorities played when it came to dealing with the AIDS epidemic. If you took McConaughey out of the film, Dallas Buyers Club would at best be a very conventional and highly average drama – with him, however, this is an outstanding and memorable film about how hard and how easy it is to be human. At the end of the film, Ron finally rides a bull. In a way, he hasn't done anything else.
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