Peddling the cure

Let 2014 be known at the year of the ‘McConassance’.

With Matthew McConaughey’s career busting out of shirtless-rom-com beefcake territory with breakneck speed, it wouldn’t be amiss to refer to the Texan actor’s newly-found second-wind as anything short of an all-out Renaissance.

For whatever reason, the promising actor got caught up doing films with titles like ‘The Wedding Planner’ throughout the ‘90s and early noughties (though money is a good a reason as any I suppose), and was – justifiably – largely written off by audiences and critics as just a glorified set of abs set to sandy-haired Southern swagger.

But in a career ‘Refresh’ that could arguably be traced back to William Friedkin’s 2011 shocker Killer Joe – in which he took on the role of the titular detective-cum-contract killer riding roughshod over a redneck family who hire him to kill its matriarch – McConaughey has suddenly become a compelling thespian duking it out with the best of them.

He’s even managed to colonise television drama – a medium currently undergoing its own Renaissance – appearing alongside sometime-collaborator Woody Harrelson in the high-concept crime thriller True Detective, which is now setting itself up for a season finale against a backdrop of rabid enthusiasm from newly-minted fans.

But feature films remain his home turf for now, and though his brief turn in Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was certainly memorable – his chest-drumming tattoo lending the film a trademark tic – it was The Dallas Buyer’s Club that placed him centre stage, and, ultimately, led to him scoring a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar at last Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.

(The fact that this ‘robbed’ his ‘Wall Street’ co-star Leonardo DiCaprio of the same award led to much cruelly amusing meme-production online.)

In a lot of ways, it was something of a predictable – though ultimately favourable – slot for McConaughey to end up in. ‘Buyer’s Club’ – spanning from 1985 to 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis – is structurally, a textbook ‘Oscar film’.

McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a hard-drinking, hard-riding (in both senses of the word) electrician and rodeo enthusiast who learns he is HIV positive, and that he has 30 days to live. Initially in denial, the homophobic cocaine-user plunges into a drugged-out stupor. When his condition is further exacerbated by a misguided – and contraband – use of the experimental anti-HIV drug zidovudine (AZT), Woodroof wakes up to the fact that he needs to make a radical move.

Hearing that an off-the-radar doctor, Vass (Griffin Dunne), is administering alternative – and ultimately more effective – cures to the Big Pharma-approved AZT, the shrewd Woodroof sniffs an opportunity. Forming an unlikely alliance with his transvestite hospital-mate, Rayon (Jared Leto), Woodroof sets up a ‘Buyer’s Club’ through which the more effective – but officially unapproved – drugs Zalcitabine (ddC) and peptide T are given away to HIV patients after they pay a $400 membership fee.

Though the drug cocktail turns out to be effective, with Woodroof and Rayon’s business even booming for a while, it’s only a matter of time before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lock their crosshairs in their general direction.

As a bare-bones narrative – the script was penned by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack – the film should hardly register above anyone’s radar as being even remotely innovative. It follows a fairly standard trajectory of redemption-through-tragedy, glazed with some cheerfully politically-correct pro-LGBT campaigning along the way. You know how it is: you can’t really argue against its good intentions, but it hardly takes you anywhere surprising.

But luckily, the film’s efforts don’t languish in its otherwise ‘vanilla’ script. Director Jean Marc Valle conducts with a detailed, edgy hand. The narrative is allowed leisurely lapses through time – cranking up the tension of Woodroof’s diagnosis, only to mock it when the feisty survivor outlives it – and the directorial stance, though working in the gilded realism common to award-friendly dramas, makes room for frenzied, shaky flourishes, which are used judiciously to illustrate Woodroof’s precarious condition.

This lends the otherwise safe film a welcome, brisk sharpness. Joyously enough, it’s a quality that is also shared by its central performances. McConaughey earns his Oscar largely by virtue of his character turn-around. Venally despicable at first – almost a grotesque caricature of the prejudiced hick – Woodroof remains a bulldozing, determined individual throughout, but the pleasure lies in watching him channel his energies into a more constructive conduit. Again, this is an expected script development. But going from emaciated-and-drug addled to emaciated-and-energised (while never losing his swagger), McConaughey is the missing – read: human – link here.

His fellow Oscar winner Jared Leto (who picked up the Best Supporting Actor award) is hardly on-screen for long enough to be truly a dramatic match for our lead. But over and above his striking physical transformation, Leto should be commended for his no-frills approach. A degree of camp is expected, of course, but it’s not indulged too readily.

If nothing else, here’s proof that a film can, in fact, be elevated by its performances. For once, I cannot argue with the Academy.