Based on a true story, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club covers the life of a straight man who is HIV-positive in the 1980s and reminds us of the recent plague.
USA
4*
Director:
Jean-Marc Vallée
Screenwriters:
Craig Borten
Melisa Wallack
Director of Photography:
Yves Bélanger
Running time: 115 minutes
How do you know you have HIV or AIDS? Or rather, why would you even entertain the possibility and think of going for an AIDS test? The reason, sadly, is because so many millions had to suffer and die so that the rest of the world could be informed. Decades of discussion and public service campaigns about HIV and AIDS have made it very clear what constitutes risky behaviour, and anyone today who is having unprotected sex or using intravenous drugs (the two biggest risk groups for the disease) should be aware they run the risk of contracting HIV.
But things were not as clear in the mid-1980s. When Rock Hudson died in 1985, it seemed like “the gay virus” was just that, and that anyone who was straight had no business worrying about their persistent cough or sharp weight loss. If you were, say, a libidinous electrician from Texas who spent half his time at the rodeo and the other half having sex with an assortment of women, sometimes more than one at a time, you certainly were not worried about HIV ever affecting you. You may even have thought that the distance between yourself and any man with limp wrists kept you safe from harm.
The Dallas Buyers Club tells the true story of such a man, named Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), whose homophobia at first prevents him from accepting he has a disease more commonly associated with the people he despises. His circle of friends – people as virulently bigoted as him – dries up almost overnight, and he is left to fend for himself without any help, even as the doctors tell him he has 30 days left to live.
The era of Reagan and Thatcher was a closeted one, and the stigmas of homosexuality and HIV merged during this time, sadly also affecting the large numbers of people who were gay but didn’t have HIV, or straight but were HIV positive.
One of the highest-profile individuals who suffered the latter fate, at least until the public became more informed, was Magic Johnson. Even earlier, when the public was still wholly ignorant of the origins of the disease, heterosexual tennis player Arthur Ashe endured a tremendous backlash when he revealed he also had HIV. After all, the original name of AIDS was GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).
Dallas Buyers Club, by the little-known Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée who also directed the exceptional coming-of-age tale C.R.A.Z.Y., is about one man’s struggle against the odds in an era of uncertainty, but in particular against a Food and Drug Administration that seems bent on playing to the pharmaceutical companies instead of the tens of thousands of terminally ill patients.
When a representative of the company that makes the antiretroviral drug AZT tells a group of doctors at a local hospital they have been selected to test it, and they will be handsomely rewarded for participating in the study, many of the physicians’ eyes light up. The drug is soon pushed through despite some major questions about its side-effects, but once it is on the market, it costs patients an unrealistic $10,000 per year.
This is an abomination that was covered in the breathtaking documentary How to Survive a Plague, which anyone interested in the wider story of the FDA dragging its feet, for reasons that often seemed to be associated with pharmaceutical interests but were in fact more complex, at a time when people were dying like flies, should watch to understand the frustration felt among the marginalized HIV/AIDS population. In Dallas Buyers Club, the focus is on Woodroof rather than the larger activist movement that impressed the urgency of the matter on the government.
Woodroof sought to keep himself alive by whatever means necessary. After travelling to Mexico to consult with a doctor who prefers the method of Antoine Béchamp to that of Louis Pasteur (i.e. the idea of keeping the host healthy, as opposed to treating a sick host with medicine) and discovering that certain vitamins and proteins are more beneficial than the doses of AZT he has been taking, he starts transporting the as yet FDA-unapproved supplements to the United States and opens the Dallas Buyers Club.
The club is a provider of alternative medicines, on average much more effective than the AZT peddled to AIDS patients for an arm and a leg. But even though the supplements pose little to no threat to the members of the club (who pay a fixed amount per month for as much medication as they require), the U.S. government becomes paranoid about their efforts to discredit the efficacy of AZT and therefore shuts them down.
Jared Leto stars as Rayon, who is transgender and becomes unlikely friends with Woodroof, acting as a connector between him and the rest of the individuals in the area affected by HIV/AIDS, most of them gay. The other main role is played by Jennifer Garner, starring as Dr. Eve Saks, who sees the rotten insides of the pharmaceutical industry and is torn between her desire to see her patients healthy and the FDA’s determination not to make the supposedly effective AZT too readily available to the public. Garner is perfect in the role as a curious and empathetic but slightly shy individual who senses her own helplessness in the face of the regulations of a big and callous government.
Woodroof’s desperate search for answers and his humanity in helping others who are in the same, nearly hopeless situation as him, stirs our empathy, and McConaughey, almost unrecognisable here as an emaciated version of the image he has cultivated over the past 15 years, is mostly successful in the slow process of letting us care about his plight.
Time is not on these characters’ side, however, and Vallée’s film clearly establishes the ineluctable ticking of the clock as weeks turn into days.
Dallas Buyers Club offers a vivid reminder of an era of constant uncertainty and widespread death not that long ago when AIDS patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma were treated like Jews with the yellow badge in Nazi Germany. Anyone who has battled a life-threatening illness is likely to sympathise with the main character of this film, and although the film’s stance on the efficacy of AZT is a little muddled (a final title card admits the medication actually turned out to be helpful, though not in the doses initially prescribed to patients), and it is at times difficult to watch, the story of fighting for survival is strong and compelling.