REVIEW: Dallas Buyer's Club (2014)

           

Dallas Buyer’s Club is a Hollywood drama about AIDS that recalls Philadelphia and yet seems desperate to be less conventional, more controversial. That Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto went through some kind of extreme physical transformation for their roles is merely typical for this kind of film, yet Dallas Buyer’s Club remains somehow fresh.

Ron Woodroof (McConaughey) lives like a cowboy in a bad movie – hustling at a rodeo, heavy drinking, drugs and lots of unprotected sex. After a fainting spill, he is unexpectedly diagnosed as HIV positive and he is given thirty days to live. Initially, he refuses to believe that he is HIV positive, thinking only gay people catch ‘the bug.’ Increasingly ostracised from his friends, he falls in with another HIV positive patient, Rayon (Leto), a transsexual, and together they concoct a scheme that will help them survive their illness and make a little money into the bargain – selling illegal drugs to AIDS patients in defiance of the established codes of practice of the American health care system.

Matthew McConaughey, much feted nowadays for not doing poor films, is very good in the lead, plays a character with a very predictable arc with heart and real honesty. Woodroof is initially a deeply unlikeable person – a homophobic, racist, misogynistic alcoholic – who slowly transforms over the course of the film into the Oskar Schindler of the AIDS epidemic – one scene in particular recalls the Spielberg film, wherein Woodroof desperately looks for possessions to sell to get drugs for his patients. Along the way, he must confront his fears and his prejudices in order to survive and he must move from a safe existence amongst friends to a place amongst society’s outsiders. This predictable emotional journey, particularly as represented in his budding friendship with the very outré Rayon, is presented realistically and believably, and with a helpful dose of humour, even if Rayon himself has a narrative trajectory all too obvious and mechanical. It is the quality of the performances, which breathes new life into the formula to which Dallas Buyer’s Club is very much attached.

The direction of Jean-Marc Vallée also helps. Though a lot more mannered than the irritating tics of his most recent film, Café de Flore, Vallée succeeds in giving certain scenes a palpable feeling of ill health. While McConaughey performs well physically, Vallée’s camera moves queasily and falls in and out of focus, both presenting a picture of a sick man that is both effective and affective. McConaughey is convincing as a sick man and Vallée’s camera gives us a sense of what it would be like to be sick. Aside from that, Vallée is a little too interested in being shocking. Though it is of course beneficial that Woodroof’s early life (or the film’s version of his early life anyway) is not safely sugar-coated, Vallée focuses a little too much on his hedonistic existence. This makes the film vaguely unlikeable in its early moments without necessarily contributing to the realism, and it recalls Flight, which rather childishly only came alive during scenes of sex and drug-taking. Ultimately, McConaughey’s performance makes one forget these few grubby, leery scenes.

The film benefits also from a political subtext, which helps heighten the drama. The film shows drug reps trying to boost the profile of the drug AZT, which has proved inconclusive during animal trials. The drug is given to AIDS patients despite making some of them worse, primarily because the system is more profit orientated than it is humanitarian. When Woodroof brings a new brand of drugs into the market, one that deals effectively with the effects of AIDS, he is frequently prosecuted and shut down. The film makes some valid points about the state of the American health care system and it is this political significance that ultimately allows Dallas Buyer’s Club to transcend its Hollywood drama framework. It is much easier to forget the clichés when the film has something to say about real world issues. Admittedly, however, since it is after all a Hollywood drama, the politics is slight. The film ultimately names and shames a single bad guy (the FDA – Federal Drug Administration), leaving the institutions and laws of the US health care system alone, rather conservatively avoiding the big issues. As well as this, the film does not really know how to address the potentially exploitative and unpleasant nature of Woodroof’s ‘buyer’s club’ where an AIDS sufferer may be turned away if they do not have any money. 

Dallas Buyer’s Club does not always feel fresh or new, but it is a film that works much better than a bald synopsis would suggest it should. This is mainly thanks to some great direction and camerawork, real world relevance and to Matthew McConaughey’s great performance, which reveals a rich and unpredictable humanity from within a role too often a Hollywood standard. If Dallas Buyer’s Club is ultimately all surface, in keeping with typical Hollywood dramas, 12 Years A Slave among them, it is nonetheless an effective and convincing film with a good sense of humour and a fantastic central performance.

REVIEW: Café de Flore (2012)

Café de Flore is the new film by Jean-Marc Vallée, which offers two alternating narratives about the nature of love, set four decades apart yet intrinsically linked. Combining a choppy, hand-held aesthetic and a trendy playlist with a dewy-eyed romanticism, the film seems to want to rehabilitate love as an important theme for modern cinema.

In the 1960s, we meet Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), who has given birth to a child with Downs syndrome, Laurent (played by Marin Gerrier). Her refusal to abandon her child has left her in semi-destitution but her love for her son does not wane. In the present day, in Montreal, Antoine (Kevin Parent), a successful DJ, has left his wife Carole (Hélène Florent) and their two teenage daughters for Rose (Evelyne Brochu), a significantly younger woman. Carole finds it exceedingly difficult to let go, unknowingly paralleling Jacqueline’s own difficulties when Laurent meets a girl at school…

Café de Flore is a film that is deeply enamoured with music and is littered with rather lyrical sequences in which the music takes precedence over dialogue and the film moves between fast and slow motion depending on the music’s tempo. At times, it feels very much like a music video and it can be a little difficult to consider the characters as little more than the ciphers that are usually seen on music channels. The film is very choppy, with Vallée rarely allowing the scenes to develop beyond their rudimentary parts and often key scenes may pass by with little fanfare, determined instead to segue into more technically orientated sequences. It is never allowed to breathe in the way of a great Woody Allen or John Cassavetes film, despite ultimately being that sort of film, concerned as it is fundamentally with love and relationships. After all, it is a somewhat philosophical work, or at least pretends to be, Vallée’s preoccupation with music often getting in the way of the big questions that the film asks, resulting in some rather facile and frustratingly preposterous answers.

Your enjoyment of Café de Flore will probably rely on a positive answer or, at the very least, a shrugging sympathy towards the positive to the following questions: Do you believe in soul mates? Do you believe in reincarnation? Are you a spiritual person? Do you believe in mysticism? How about mediums? And the tough one: Do you believe in true love? If, like me, all of your answers lean towards the negative, Café de Flore is probably not for you. The film is thoroughly unconvincing as a passionate argument for the existence of these things and when it becoming clear, in the climax, just what the complex multi-narrative storyline essentially boils down to, it can be difficult to avoid the horrible feeling that you have walked into the wrong self-help meeting.

To accentuate the positive, Café de Flore is an ambitious work that does attempt to look at some of the big questions about life and love. The film is not without its more successful moments, such as good performances all round, but particularly from Paradis and Gerrier, though their storyline does descend into the trapping of a TV movie, falling prey to the film’s destructive grand design. The rough-hewn, not entirely conventional aesthetic does have its compensations and the film can say a lot without dialogue, which has become quite a rare skill. The film is very much like some of the work of Terence Malick though, unfortunately, it is more like The Tree of Life, another film that was often intellectually stultifying whilst also being visually fascinating, than, say, Badlands or The Thin Red Line. The film is also not without its nice, even evocative, touches, such as when Carole looks at Antoine but sees the younger Antoine whom she fell in love with all those years ago. Similarly, the film is hampered by many eye-rolling moments, particularly when the Beefeater spectre makes an appearance or when the film hints at the links between the two stories, clunky moments that are irritating even before the reasons behind them become wholly apparent.

What we are left with then is a film that is initially intriguing and one that is often open to interpretation and invention, but which reveals itself to be ultimately shallow and unconvincing. It becomes a film that is difficult to sympathise with, especially if you are not likely to be taken by what it is trying to say. It is a passable film let down by an ending that not only concludes the film on a bum note, but one that actively disrupts any of the good faith you may have had in the film before then. When Carole apologizes to Antoine and their problems are speedily solved at the film’s climax, the film takes a slightly sexist turn, wherein Carole suddenly has to apologize for things that she has no possible responsibility for. The film comes together around the idea that maternal and romantic love are the same, as if it is suggesting that all women are only either mothers or girlfriends. Equally, the film seems designed solely to empathize with Antoine’s position, which is especially problematic as Antoine is really rather unlikeable. Also, the film presents itself as an examination of the many forms of love, though the types of love that it looks at are solely familial and heterosexual. All of these problems culminate with the impression that where the film needed to be profound and understanding, it was merely meaningless and tactless.

Café de Flore is formally interesting and narratively challenging, though both speak more of the director’s artistic pretensions than his abilities. Though it is ambitious and its conclusions about love are nothing if not original, it is the kind of film that is just too easy to dismiss as so much claptrap.