Dallas Buyers Club

Seen at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle

Bea says: I have worked in health care my whole working life, so I was interested to see this retro film about HIV/AIDS and the drugs that treat it, and have been intrigued that despite subject matter usually deemed unappealing (unless given the Hollywood treatment, like Philadelphia) it has been doing well at the box office and getting some good reviews.

Now having seen it, I can say unreservedly that it is the quality of the acting that is drawing people in - both Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are just so, so good in their respective roles as the protagonist Ron Woodroof and his business partner, Rayon.  They were both amazing to watch and for me this review could almost end there - go and see it, just to see them act.  We have been busy seeing all the big Oscar contenders this year, and if one of these doesn't get a best actor/best supporting actor for this it will be the gritty subject matter and not the performance that is to blame.

The story is (apparently very loosely) based on fact - Ron Woodroof did exist, did have HIV in the early days of the disease, and did set up the Dallas Buyers Club, importing alternatives to the highly toxic AZT doses being given at the time, for people who couldn't get AZT, or didn't want it, or needed something else - particularly for the cognitive changes that AIDS results in.

So part of the storyline gives us a bit of an insight into the pharmaceutical companies' relationships with government, although perhaps not in a very balanced way.  The other part of the film is us getting to know Ron better, and the different shades of his character and personality as his old friends and life become irrelevant in the reality of living with HIV and AIDS.  Ron becomes more likeable through this, more tolerant perhaps, and we see the different facets of his character - probably already there but not shown in the initial scenes - like loyalty, compassion and vulnerability.  So it is a great character study, as it is but to a lesser degree with the character of Rayon.  McConaughey is unrecognisable from his rom-com days, not least because he shed 3 stone to play the part.

It is also, for people my age, a somewhat grim reminder of those early HIV days when people thought you could get AIDS and die from just touching someone, and when we were all told that it was going to be the 20th century plague - and of course in some parts of the world it has been, but that is not the story of this film.

Wonderful. Uplifting, but not in a cheesy way. See it.
****1/2

Cecil says: As Bea says, Ron looked fantastically 1980s, wonderfully Texan and dreadfully ill almost from the start of this film. If you look at posters of the actor and how he normally looks, you can see what a great job McConaughey did.

I never really warmed to the Woodroof character, though, in spite of his mellowing personality and dogged determination to beat the system. There's something awful about the sleazy world of coke sniffing, beer boozing homophobia, alongside the reckless rodeo-loving Texan lifestyle he portrayed. And I was unconvinced by the way Eve, his doctor, 'befriended' him to the extent of going for dinner with him later on in the film.

Rayon, the transsexual, was by far the most believable character in the story, and the one who came across warmly from the outset, though her last moments were perhaps the most distressing in the whole film, and the scene with her father, where she pleads for financial help the most moving.

I'm no health expert, and as a user of homeopathy alongside conventional medicine, you might expect me to be drawn in to the storyline of dreadful pharmaceutical industry management of the drugs industry in the States and feel the same outrage as Woodroof at the FDA regulatory system in America. But his outburst in the public health meeting towards the end, if my experience is anything to go by, would only lead to ordinary members of the public shunning the angry eccentric rather than joining his campaign. The scene felt like an instruction from the director to empathise with Woodroof though.

In fact, in health terms, the character I'd most empathise with was the doctor struck off the US register, who ends up doing wonderful work in Mexico. He comes out of the story far more positively than Eve or Woodroof, in my view.

I did enjoy this film, but it had a sense of foreboding to it virtually from the opening scene (some sordid sex on the fringes of a rodeo show). And, incredibly, it is the 5th film in a row I've seen in 2014 which is really about survival. How many takes on survival will we have in 2014 and is this somehow a message for our time?

I think I need a more positive film next time we go out

***.5

Twelve Years a Slave

Bea says: We have seen one of Steve McQueen's films before (Hunger), and although an excellent film about a difficult subject, it was pretty distressing and not one I would rush back to see.  12 Years a Slave is perhaps a little gentler than that film - just really in the sense that it follows more of a story over a period of years, and we get an opportunity to witness the protagonist's - Solomon Northrup, played well by Chiwetel Ejiofor - personal growth (perhaps not the word, but ability to deal with his situation) and relationships.

However, there are of course distressing scenes; the worst one for me being the one where Solomon is hung - and having been rescued from death is nevertheless left for the rest of day with the noose around his neck, suspended from a tree with his feet just barely touching the muddy ground below.  Throughout this long, long scene we focus with the camera on keeping Solomon's toes on the ground, and hear his rasping, desperate breathing as he chokes just enough oxygen in to keep alive.  After a while, I put my hands over my ears, and wondered, as I am sure I was supposed to, how could anyone do this to anyone else?

The white plantation-owning characters, and other white characters, were actually a fairly rounded lot though, a mixture of contradictions - in the scene above it is a white man who saves Solomon's life, but still leaves him to, I assume, learn his lesson.  Some of the slave owners are relatively philanthropic, some are less so - and their motivations aren't always easy to understand.  The character of Mistress Epps (played extremely well by Sarah Paulson) was particularly interesting to watch; and I wondered if I had been her, and had been born and brought up in that culture, with those expectations, how differently would I have behaved?  It was a chilling thought, and made me glad I wasn't, and that I have grown in up a time which has had the benefit of Wilberforce, the suffragette movement, and the civil rights movements.

Very thought-provoking stuff.  McQueen is a very good director, had a good story to work with and some excellent actors in his team - my only criticism would be, perhaps just a little to slick, a bit like this film has had the Hollywood treatment.  It's hard to put a finger on what I'd like to be different though.  It also made me want to revisit that classic 70s mini-series, which I remember watching as a child, Roots - but probably because there are just so few films made about slavery there isn't much else to compare this to.

*** 1/2

Cecil says: Perhaps because this is the 4th successive film I've seen this year where the theme is basically 'survival', I actually liked this film the least of the four.

Of course, my hesitation could also be linked to my knee-jerk suspicion of any film nominated for sooooo many Oscars, usually because I can't help thinking that such blanket coverage of nominations must be as much to do with Hollywood's psyche and its own hang-ups as it is about the quality of the film itself.

Cinematographically, though, I simply preferred the Mandela film, the Railwayman movie and the Redford solo sailor epic. They also touched me more immediately for their different portrayals of survival. So, maybe I would have liked Twelve Years more if it had been the first film I'd seen this year?

Having said all that, it is a horrific and fascinating story. It's interesting that, on our travels in the States a couple of years back, we heard quite a lot about the Underground Railway (given a brief mention in the postscript credits because Northrup apparently helped others to escape in later years), but nobody anywhere mentioned the practice of kidnapping and sale into slavery of free blacks. But I guess the Underground Railway has a heroic angle to it, whereas pressgangs and dupesters are a part of America's past they would probably prefer to forget.

I also wondered what the hell Benedict Cumberbatch was doing there? Surely there are enough posh-sounding American actors around who could have played that role just as well. And Cumberbatch is popping up in just about every film or major TV production going at the moment.

Talking of familiar faces, we were both amused to see Omar from The Wire appear early on in this film but then bow out after only a couple of scenes; and then the gay ad man from Mad Men suddenly appeared on the steps of one plantation home, which gave us another reason to smile...

But none of this really takes anything away from the film itself. It does tell a good story; it is a period of American history not often talked about. And the actors do a good job across the board.

Hard to criticise it. But so many Oscar nominations? No, really...

***