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: The Wolf of Wall Street (2014)

The Wolf of Wall Street presents a version of the life of Jordan Belfort, one based on his own autobiography, a stockbroker who manipulated the stock market and who was jailed for fraud but not before living the high life with more money than he knew what to do with. In three hours, Scorsese presents the life he led before it all came crashing down, a perfect opportunity for the director to be at his excessive best.

Jordan Belfort (as played by Leonardo DiCaprio and, most likely, in real life) is a deeply unlikeable person and three hours may initially seem like much too long a time to have to spend in his company. As with Casino (The Wolf of Wall Street’s most similar antecedent), Scorsese keeps the film from flagging with a mixture of brilliantly orchestrated montages and fascinating set pieces, though here he trades sexually explicit scenes for violence. The film has been criticized by many for glamorising Belfort’s excessive, hedonistic and morally bankrupt existence though this is to ignore the implicit moral complexity in the film and in all of Scorsese’s work.

People often mistake the amorality in Scorsese’s work as a reflection on the filmmaker rather than on the films’ characters and their milieus. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas, reveals his own class hatred by referring to the working class as ‘nobodies’, not Scorsese’s. The violence of Casino reflects how gangsters do their business – along with a veiled criticism of capitalism in general – and exposes their blasé attitude to such violence, but it is not necessarily Scorsese’s view of such violence. The violence in Scorsese’s films is not horrible just because it is graphic, but because it is so common and normal to the characters. The Wolf of Wall Street shows another dark underworld without any explicit criticism because it is concerned with showing the world as seen by the characters that live in it, and because Scorsese is too good a filmmaker to insult the viewer’s intelligence. What is depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street is very clearly horrible, so why waste time lamenting about it when a shot lingering on a woman’s mixed feelings of joy and sorrow at shaving her head for money reveals plainly enough to those who pay attention that money is a corrupting force. Ultimately, Scorsese leaves it up to the audience – rather bravely in some scenes. Towards the end of the film, Belfort bids farewell to his company and employees, giving a long speech that some people may find moving while others will find it disgusting. Scorsese films and scores it as if it is moving, as if it is some kind of dramatic and emotional culmination, but it isn’t. It’s narcissistic, materialistic, snobbish and, with the sudden reappearance of the woman who shaved her head now presented as a woman who was down on her luck before Belfort, thanks to his magnanimity, gave her a helping hand, false. The point, and arguably the fun of the scene, is that each member of the audience can either watch critically or be fooled by the emotion. Or they can simply watch in awe of the audacity of it all since this is Scorsese’s bravest, riskiest and most vibrant film since Goodfellas.

That said, the film is far from perfect and there are stylistic alterations that do not fit too well into Scorsese’s way of doing things. The sexually explicit scenes are much more problematic than his usual scenes of violence, because the violence is always faked but the nudity and the leering masculinity is less so. The film, in recreating the sexual politics of Belfort’s company, ends up being similarly open to criticism. However, it is a minor criticism as the explicitness is a truer reflection of the reality than something tamer would have been and the audience is still allowed to hate it if they want.

Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are very good. DiCaprio delivers his best performance for Scorsese or anyone else by quite a long way. Ditto Jonah Hill, who is almost unbearable to nearly everything else and yet delivers a great performance by playing his usual role bigger, louder and much more hateful. A cameo from Belfort himself may be a touch too complicit for some viewers, but it again shows Scorsese as willing to stir the pot.

The Wolf of Wall Street is either a powerfully critical exploration of a world of greed, waste and corruption or a blackly comedic journey into excess and stupidity or both depending on one’s own level of outrage. It is repellent and nauseating, as it was supposed to be, and brilliantly constructed and well acted. Filmmaking of risk and greatness is rare these days, in Scorsese’s cinema and in general, and The Wolf of Wall Street will ultimately stand up amongst the great films of Scorsese’s career.

REVIEW: Killer Joe (2012)

 
 
  Killer Joe is a jet black comedy and marks the apparent return from obscurity by William Friedkin, best known for The French Connection, The Exorcist and Cruising and not as well known for his less groundbreaking killer tree film. With Killer Joe, is Friedkin back at his best?

  Chris Smith (Judd Hirsch) needs money fast and he hatches a plan with his dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) to get a hold of his mother’s life insurance money. To do this, they hire Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). As is the norm for black crime comedies, hardly anything goes to plan.

  Based on a play by Tracy Letts, as was Friedkin’s recent Bug, the film is quite minimalist, with only a few locations and not very many actors. Apart from a motorcycle chase and the loud, Gothic atmospherics, the film is relatively static. The film is largely made up of scenes of people shouting at each other, the characters as suffocating as the setting. Hirsch is particularly loud, but he is far from out of place when the first scene involves thunder and lightning, torrential rain, full frontal nudity, raging arguments and two more physical fights. The film establishes itself early on as an over the top piece of pulp fiction with no likable characters and a film that delights in showing horrible people doing horrible things to each other. Humanist and subtle it is not, but enjoyable it can be.

  The film noticeably cools when Killer Joe is onscreen, though Friedkin does emphasis the crunch of his boots and the snap of his cigarette lighter, mixing them up on the soundtrack to a comical degree. McConaughey gives a great performance, his Killer Joe a relatively quiet and reserved character, though one whose underlying sadism is barely concealed. In the film’s two main unsettling scenes, McConaughey slowly eases the psychopath out of his character until he is a wholly horrifying creature, in one scene bending vampirically over Juno Temple and emitting guttural moans; the other will be discussed further below. In the scene with Temple, Friedkin, surprisingly given the rest of the film, cuts away before the worst happens, presumably aware that, in this scene in particular, the imagination works worst.

  Killer Joe is often very funny, if even in the way it charts the inevitable downfall of the family. In fact, the twists and turns that the plot takes are often presented for comic effect, with the key revelations more likely to trigger laughter than gasps. Here, it is Thomas Haden Church who shines out, playing the utterly useless and mainly contemptible father, who initially resists his son’s plan only because it is too complicated for him. One scene with him and Gershon in the lawyer’s office is a classic in deadpan slapstick.

  However, Friedkin’s main priority with Killer Joe is to shock and there is one much written about scene towards the end of the film involves a fried chicken leg that is deeply uncomfortable, mainly because one suspects that it is being played for laughs. Presumably justified by the turn that the plot takes, the extremity and perversity of the scene coupled with the film’s awkward mother-whore dichotomy make it a difficult scene to get past. The symbolism is worn on the film’s sleeve - Sharla as the middle-aged whore who must be punished and Dottie as the virginal innocent who must be celebrated. Though presented so didactically that it can’t be taken without a little possibly-intended irony, the severity of Sharla’s punishment, which is directly associated with her being a ‘whore’, is a little too leering and misogynistic. It is true, however, that the film has little good to say about males and it may turn out that Friedkin is actually saying something interesting about how some of us can be shocked by such intellectual matters while laughing our way through the misanthropic plot about a son hiring a hit man to kill his own mother for her insurance money. That said, Friedkin deifies Dottie and demonises Sharla to such an extent that it is difficult to not leave the film feeling slightly tainted by the film’s rather dodgy sexual politics.

  Killer Joe is, on the whole, a rather grim but enjoyable film. It might say more about your own tastes and pre-occupations than you want it to, depending on how shocked or not you may be by it. Ultimately, Friedkin set out to make a grim crime comedy and, for the most part, he succeeded in making a very well executed one, surprising in view of some of his other more recent troubled films. Killer Joe is as clever and funny as it is shocking and distancing, a little unlikeable but often great fun and with a killer of an ending.