While reflecting on some of the films I've seen so far this year, I've noticed an interesting trend, though I'd be naive to think that it's genuinely a "trend" and most certainly, it's nothing new. But I've been thinking about how many of this year's quality films succeed largely based on their ability to allow the masses to deeply comprehend what it's like to live the life of someone that most of us will never experience.
Call it the year of empathy building.
Four films spring instantly to mind. "Gravity," with its spare plot, left enough breathing room for us to contemplate true isolation and the stresses on an astronaut like no other film about space that preceded it. "12 Years a Slave" seems to be gaining stature as the greatest-ever filmed look at the ground-level atrocities of slavery, and I've spoken to a few African-American friends who have told me that though the stories of their families' past and their generational connections to slavery were always discussed and respected, this is the film that cracked open that experience on an emotional level.
The third film in my "empathy series" is the one I'm talking about here, "Dallas Buyers Club," which chronicles the struggle in the mid-1980s for those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS to navigate both the fledgling drug treatment bureaucracy and the fear-filled ignorance of an unenlightened public. The forth film, a sort of contemporary counterpart in some ways to "Dallas Buyers Club," is the excellent "Fruitvale Station," a film that anyone who is not black needs to watch to better understand just how the residue of racial injustice is still stuck on our fingers.
In my estimation, it's a great year when so many films have the real potential to generate true empathy in audiences. Perhaps this is even one of the measuring sticks we could use to define what makes a movie great. Alfred Hitchcock famous explained that a full quarter of the camera shots in his films were through the eyes of a character to draw the audience into the film as if they were a part of them. This year, the narratives themselves are, on some level, accomplishing the same thing.
"Dallas Buyers Club," if nothing else, will shock you into anger and sadness, thanks most of all to two brave and fantastic performances. Matthew McConaughey's shocking physical transformation and gut-level commitment to the role of real-life electrician Ron Woodroof is the cinematic yang to the yin of Tom Hanks' performance in Philadelphia. It is a primal performance, a fantastic achievement in a career so noticeably on the rise that McConaughey has to be a sure bet for an Oscar nomination in a year packed with fantastic leading male performances.
Of equal note here is the work of Jared Leto as Rayon, a drag queen with AIDS who strikes up a partnership with Woodroof to help distribute medications to treat the disease that have not been approved by the FDA. Perhaps best remembered for the TV series "My So-Called Life," Leto quietly accumulated a few solid performances but in recent years has put his most public efforts into his band 30 Seconds To Mars. This performance, however - if the award season tea leaves are any true indication - is starting to feel like a coronation. And Leto pulls off the feat of breathing a genuine humanity into the kind of character that would otherwise shock and scare the filmgoers of middle America.
The plot of "Dallas Buyers Club" - based on real events - is probably the reason why the film works as well as it does. This is no "gay film." In fact, though I'm sure that gay audiences have and will continue to support the movie with their ticket purchases and comments about the film, there is no doubt that this movie has got to be about as enjoyable for them to watch as "12 Years a Slave" or "Fruitvale Station" is to a black person in America. This is raw pain: angering, frustrating, defeating - so maddening that you wonder why you're spending you time watching because there isn't anything "enjoyable" about it, and catharsis shouldn't hurt this deeply.
Ron Woodroof is straight. In fact, he's downright homophobic, almost to the point of being a caricature of every homophobic, red state-living, beer-guzzling man in America. It's 1985, and the film opens with McConaughey's Woodroof banging two country girls backstage at a rodeo, just to make it clear to us from the get-go that this man ain't no pussy. So when the already-thin Woodroof suffers a few freak medical mishaps and is told he has HIV, he responds with an acid-spewing tirade of anti-gay slurs and indignant denials and retreats to his trailer to drink, do blow, and watch his buddy bang two local girls (or hookers?) while he watches from the couch.
Woodroof refuses to accept the doctors' diagnosis of 30 days left to live, but eventually faces it as he must, struggling all the while to comprehend how he could have contracted a gay man's disease as his friends start to learn of his situation and abandon him. He begs the benevolent Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) to allow him to participate in a study to test out AZT, a new drug to combat HIV. He quickly becomes as infuriated as any of us would be that someone with such a finite timeline on Earth would run a 50 percent chance of being given a placebo instead of the actual drug, just because that's how studies are conducted if drugs are to receive FDA approval. He starts looking for another way to score the potentially dangerous drugs, knowing that he has nothing at all at this point to lose.
The chance encounter that alters the course of the rest of Woodroof's life occurs during one particular hospitalization when he discovers that he is sharing a room with Rayon (Leto), a drag queen who reveals that he is taking part in a drug study and sharing his medication with a friend for a high payout. After suffering through Woodroof's obligatory homophobic tirade, Rayon and Woodroof strike up a partnership to expand Rayon's scheme into something bigger. Before long, Woodroof is making trips to Mexico to purchase cases of unapproved drugs and supplements to sell to men suffering with HIV and AIDS at home. Through his research and the help of a clever but disbarred doctor now living in Mexico and operating out of a ramshackle clinic, Woodroof comes to see AZT as a poison and a threat to improving the health of people living with AIDS.
Woodroof and Rayon rent hotel rooms and begin a "buyers club," modeled on groups that have sprung up in other major cities. The concept is that people pay a monthly fee and then have access to the drugs that they need, which allows those who run the clubs to avoid - on a technicality - the status of being someone who is selling unapproved drugs illegally. Their patrons are buying "club memberships." A central conflict of the film is Woodroof's constant run-ins with Dr. Saks' supervisor, Dr. Sevard (Denis O'Hare) and the authorities both local and federal, particularly those from the slow-moving FDA.
As expected, "Dallas Buyers Club" makes the Food and Drug Administration into a one-dimensional villain, an institutional bureaucracy of a government enforcing ridiculous policies that cost lives and wield power over groups of people they don't like. And frankly, when you come to empathize with what it might have been like to have HIV in the mid-to-late 1980s, it seems unlikely that there would be any other reasonable way to view the FDA. This insight provides viewers with the film's emotional motor, which is an underlying sense of anger and injustice at the least and, for some viewers, most likely a full-blown sense of rage.
We also get a moment similar to the one in "Philadelphia" where the straight man comes to respect - at least on some level - the gay man, though I must say that it's no less powerful or satisfying here just because you can see it coming. In fact, it's genuinely emotional here, in large part because the two men - for as profoundly different as they are - share the same disease. Some of the film's best moments come when the straight Woodroof is given the same public treatment as a gay man.
Where "Dallas Buyers Club" suffers a bit for me is in its direction, and Jean-Marc Vallee does not have an extensive filmography to suggest a rich history or clear style as a film maker. This film levels out on the same emotional plane for long periods of time. It relies heavily on cut transitions and jarring visual jumps. For lack of a better way to put it, it just feels like a movie that is working because of its performances and the nature of the true story being told, not because there is anything artistic being done by the production team to elevate the story to another level.
I feel confident that McConaughey and Leto will spend a lot of time in tuxedos in the coming weeks because "Dallas Buyers Club" is one of those award-bait actor's showcases. Many of Meryl Streep's nominations, for instance, come from average films. When the performance of the actor elevates the film to a higher level, a nomination is much more likely. There is no doubt that this film is elevated to another level by these two men. Aside from them, "Dallas Buyers Club" feels like a solid TV movie that would air on HBO.
For as much as "Dallas Buyers Club" is a film meant to help us understand what it would have been like to have HIV/AIDS during a time when no one understood the disease or its victims, I think the film generates a second topic of discussion that is equally challenging and perhaps even more far-reaching, which is the debate over to what extent our governmental, legal and medical systems should allow the terminally ill to control what they put into their bodies. It's a fierce debate that certainly resonates today, and watching the struggles of a man in the '80s, a reminder that the wheels of certain government agencies turn at a snail's pace.
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