University of Cape Town – ELL1013F
(05/03/2014)

‘The Best Little Cartel in Texas’: The Ron Woodroof Story

Dallas Buyers Club

A film Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof, Jared Leto as Rayon and Jennifer Garner as Dr. Eve Saks.

One Line Verdict:

Come for the McConaughey tour-de-force, stay for the extended character development and remember it for the enigmatic butterfly scene.

If there’s any man one could, in all earnestness, say deserves a confirmed diagnosis of HIV, it’s Ron Woodroof. To be clear, that’s not because he’s a particularly awful character – though any audience knows he has his unlikable moments – but because at the beginning of Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club it seems little else can spur him to escape his ethical pigsty.

Though the film’s story is only loosely elaborated from the original Ron’s ordeals in the mid-80’s, there’s hardly a truer depiction of a ‘walking-wounded’ individual in recent cinema than McConaughey’s stark and emaciated cowboy here. In a sense, he’s the bizarro-version of Tom Hanks’ zeitgeist-courting role in 1993’s Philadelphia: a self-consciously typical red-blooded male Texan, recoiling from the dissonance of Rock Hudson’s famous exposal only to find the virus already a part of his condition. Deathly thin when we first meet him – McConaughey lost a horrifying 47 pounds for the role – Woodroof is a man clearly terrified by his own capacity for impotence. When we see him rutting like an asthmatic dog with an anonymous companion in one of his rodeo stalls, Woodroof’s eyes in extreme close-up betray a haunted grief in evidence even before his inciting diagnosis. He’s often only a self-confession away from substituting for the ring’s resident clown.

On one of his (seemingly regular) hospital visits, the masked physicians’ attempts to gently saddle him with a 30-Day life expectancy only provoke swaggering outbursts and a latent homophobia. We can see before he does how the stages of grief are taking hold. The ultimate surprise of the movie then is Woodroof’s innate inability to manage the fifth one: he just can’t bring himself to fade away from life. In fact he’s seemingly the only straight man in America at the time to see through AIDS as neither a death sentence nor an imposed plague. To our and the story’s better interests, he takes it instead as a business opportunity, although only after nearly killing himself by overdosing on smuggled AZT – the antagonistic Food and Drug Administration’s questionable early form of treatment. On his first leg of an ongoing global tour to procure unapproved medicine, Woodroof winters in Mexico before sneaking back, hilariously, to the Lone Star state, disguised as a pastor, hauling a trunkful of vitamins. With the unlikely partnership of Jared Leto’s cute Marc-Bolanesque transgender Rayon (30 Seconds to Mars fans will appreciate the reference) and the co-operation of Jennifer Garner’s sympathetic doctor, he provides alms for Dallas’ stricken LGBT community, avoiding prosecution by running a Buyers Club racket of monthly- paid memberships. As a continuous transformation, Woodroof’s story is evinced in a quasi-documentary style of blackout cuts and deliberately confrontational handy-cam, re-enforcing a sense of inescapable reality in a squalid district.

If the real Woodroof ever had any utopian liberal reconciliation with “faggotry”, the film thankfully doesn’t show it. It’s strength lies in the slow-burning assumption of Respect – both Ron’s for the lovably curt Rayon and ultimately ours for the man himself. From that starting-point, a surprising number of historical truths become clear. Firstly, that the Political Correctness paradigm of the 90’s had as it’s root just this kind of individual chastening – of an ordinary American who could no longer class the AIDS pandemic as a different kind of suffering to his own. Secondly, that the red-blooded Rock-Hudson-John-Wayne figure of masculinity was rightfully discredited in the 80’s thanks to its role in such a culture of indifference. Lastly, and most pertinently, that it’s successor – typified by, you guessed it, Matthew McConaughey’s anaesthetized-hipster persona since Dazed and Confused in 1993 – was always, in itself, an open fake, but that beneath it lay a ridiculously interesting insecurity. This is the key to McConaughey’s recent and wholly unexpected emergence as a deserving Oscar- winner: he’s the same ‘dude’ but a far more honest version, stripped of all his luxuries, leaving an actually attractive core of personality that elevates the entire film to the level of existential drama. Without McConaughey, the movie may only serve as a dressed-up Lifetime True Story.

That’s not to downplay either Leto or Garner’s equally solid supporting-roles; only that there’s certainly no chance of McConaughey being overshadowed. The one clear fault in the movie- it’s abrupt ending- can even potentially be explained in reference to Woodroof’s portrayed character: I can’t imagine he would’ve appreciated any unnecessary Hollywood spin. An overly right-wing paranoia of ‘Big Pharma’ also permeates as a sub-plot but it really doesn’t make that much of a distraction. As such, it’s understandable then why, in a year of classic survivalist cinema (re: 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, even Nebraska…), Dallas Buyers Club’s 3 Oscar nods are unsurprising. In portraying, for possibly the first time, the truly apocalyptic personal dimension of AIDS, the film feels essential and authentic and tells an existential narrative with a knowing glance at the sympathetic viewer. Life, we understand, is the death sentence we’ve always been denying, for which there may be no cure, but there are at least ways of prolonging a kind of amicable humour in its place.