Drugstore cowboy

Dallas Buyer’s Club starts with a skeletal moustached Matthew McConaughey, pants down, bucking in the stall with some gungy honeys while just outside cowboys and clowns get trampled in the dirt by furious broncos. This gets at least a B+ for inventive ominousness. McConaughey’s playing one Ron Woodroof, the real-life Texan electrician, amateur rodeo rider and professional party boy who in 1985 learned he had HIV and was given 30 days to live. Determined to beat those odds rather than succumb to despair—“I prefer to die with my boots on,” he says—Woodroof starts gobbling up black market AZT. When he finds that AZT only makes matters worse, he investigates and begins to patronize global experiments in AIDS-fighting medicines, eventually opening his own “buyer’s club” so as to get those non-FDA-approved meds to people who need them and support his own treatment program.

Along the way, Woodroof goes from being a violent, bigoted asshole whose apparently abundant sex appeal is rather mysterious—despite the fact that he’s Matthew McConaughey—to being a paragon of openhearted endurance and pansexual brotherhood. This reformation of the redneck dirtbag is by far the film’s most impressive achievement, with capital-K kudos to McConaughey, though the radical weight loss McConaughey underwent for the role is problematic. This shocking physical transformation is presumably meant to dissolve the actor into the character, but I find it has rather the opposite effect: there are times when you look at McConaughey’s emaciated body and all you can think is, Why is the actor doing this to himself? Jared Leto also stands out—both for his own weight loss and for the strength of his performance—as Woodroof’s business partner, a drug-addled transgendered person who listens to nothing but T-Rex. Leto looks really good as a woman.

Café de flore director Jean-Marc Vallée seems to have a special interest in tales of wild men coming down after riding high in the saddle. Working from a workmanlike script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, Vallée seems unusually invested in clear storytelling, employing refreshing few of the stylistic flourishes that make some of his films feel like music videos. Dallas Buyer’s Club’s most visually flamboyant moment is actually quite lovely, with Woodroof wandering into a room full of butterflies. The scene could easily have been cut, but I’m glad it remains. The image says so much about this character’s transformation without speaking a single word.

P.S.: If you want to learn more about how big pharma and the U.S. government appallingly failed to respond to the AIDS epidemic, see the documentary How to Survive a Plague. 

                     

Royal chore: The Young Victoria

“Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself, in a game being played against your will?” Posed to rabbity and moustachioed Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend) by soon-to-be teen Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt), it’s a sort of trick question, what with Albert being a thus-far fumblingly ingratiating suitor.

The question’s also intended as an indicator of Victoria’s inner turmoil—on the cusp of attaining unfathomable power, she’s still required to hold someone’s hand every time she mounts a staircase—yet like so much of what’s said throughout The Young Victoria, it hardly needs to be spoken aloud. Victoria’s sense of entrapment has been made abundantly clear in the scenes that preceded this one, which literally transpires over a chess board no less, with each of Victoria’s key oppressors, including mom (Miranda Richardson), looking on.

But it also feels like a trick question posed from one actor to another. Friend and Blunt were surely perfectly willing and handsomely remunerated participants in this lavish costume ball in search of a durable narrative thread, yet regardless of their individual merits as actors there’s no mistaking their ultimate usefulness as pretty objects to be played with and re-positioned in one terribly fraught and over-calculated scene after another. There is after all much history to plow through here, and the filmmakers don’t have time for such unruly forces as spontaneity, tension or nuance to get in the way.

So much of The Young Victoria is consumed with expository voice-over, expository letter reading and expository dialogue. Exposition usually serves a story, but in this case there’s just as much exposition as there is story. It’s hard to believe that the film, so often stiff, draggy and dull, was written by Julian Fellowes, the same fellow who scripted Gosford Park, a movie characterized by looseness, mischief and misdirection. Of course that movie was directed by Robert Altman, whose special genius incorporated those precise traits. What a different tone we find under the charge of Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose C.R.A.Z.Y. was so plagued with flashy, humdrum set-pieces, and who here seems far less engaged with the material and far less discriminate as to what to do with it. There are a few silly, show-offy effects that recall Vallée’s earlier cause célèbre—a scene where every hair on Miranda Richardson’s arm suddenly stands at attention is distracting mainly because I never imagined Richardson was so hirsute—but mostly this is buttoned-down, business-like, with every event heavily telegraphed, and the evocation of Victoria and Albert’s youthful love so repressed it’s positively, well, Victorian.

The cast is largely quite strong, with Blunt less sexy than usual yet imperious and vulnerable, very good with the small transitions such as the one where she resolves to be less emasculating to her husband—of course that’s after he takes a bullet for her. Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne, the rejected corner of the movie’s political love triangle, is suitably charming and an intriguingly self-assured presence amidst all the pomp, his posture often less than erect, his hands in search of a piece of furniture to pat as he doles out sound if conservative and slyly cynical advice to the inexperienced new Queen. Jim Broadbent looks ridiculous and is an utter hoot as the outspoken King William, who unfortunately dies pretty early in the picture. Richardson would probably be great if she had more to do. Friend I’m not sure what to make of. He mostly longs for Victoria, then finally gets her and the honeymoon’s over in short shrift and he becomes hard to like. He could surely have been less mousy. But I don’t know how any actors, however talented, are supposed to do their work effectively when every scene in ultimately drowned in a score as buoyancy-sucking as that of Ilan Eshkeri’s. You’d think he’d been asked to compose music for the goddamned coronation.