Vallée: Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Dallas Buyers Club is a loose biopic of Ron Woodrof (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas electrician who was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-80s and established one of the first underground markets for unapproved drugs and supplements. In Jean-Marc Vallée’s version, Woodrof’s also homophobic, but, to its credit, the film doesn’t really play out as the story of a homophobe heroically conquering his fears. Certainly, Woodrof does become less homophobic as the film proceeds, partly due to his friendship with transgender patient Rayon (Jared Leto), but there’s no great moment of epiphany, nor does his change of heart affect his character in any fundamental way. Instead, it’s just a matter of exposure – all it really takes is for Woodrof to spend a significant amount of time around gay men for him to gradually, imperceptibly embrace them as one of his own. In any case, something Woodrof learns very early on is that, once he’s infected, he might as well as be anything along the LBGT spectrum, since the film opens in the earlier days of the epidemic, when being diagnosed was tantamount to being outed, even or especially when the diagnosis didn’t seem to correspond to any known sexual proclivity or profile. And so it makes sense that Woodrof quickly learns to disregard anything that’s supposedly essential or even characteristic about the disease – he focus on symptoms, not cures - turning the Buyers Club into a way of staying one step ahead of anyone trying to co-opt the disease for their own agenda, especially the big pharmaceutical companies, backed by the FDA, who quickly come to seem like an elongation of the virus, organisms at the edge of life. Not content to outwit his body, Woodrof enjoins the Club to outwit the operation of market forces on their bodies, creating a sense of precarity that feels entirely present, or at least makes the film feel like it’s set in the present, shot in real time, suffused with the unfussy immediacy of a docudrama or telemovie. Moving from one safe house to the next, jacking in to all the cruising highways and byways of 80s Dallas, Woodrof’s crusade perhaps captures the frenzied, speculative ingenuity of the early-mid AIDS crisis better than a regular, elegaic period piece – and at its most memorable moments it’s positively anti-elegaic, a steady-eyed celebration of everyone who refused to be victims of the disease, let alone the vast bureaucratic architecture that surrounded it.