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