Selling AIDS drugs in Dallas

dallas-buyers-club“Screw the FDA. I’m going to be DOA.”

Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey), a newly diagnosed and very sick man with AIDS, says this to his doctor Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) in the summer of 1985. She had just told him that he can’t get the then FDA unapproved AZT, or any of the promising drugs then only available in Europe. First, Ron bribes a hospital orderly to steal the AZT being used in the study Ron can’t get into. Then, after he figures out the AZT does more harm than good, he starts buying other unapproved medications on the black market. He gets them into the hands and bodies of other people with AIDS through the Dallas Buyers Club, a legally problematic scheme that he borrowed from New York and San Francisco, where other people with AIDS were struggling to find some treatment that actually worked. Ron Woodruff was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, and in the movie, he is given a month to live. He died in 1992.

Dallas Buyers Club is the story of a man who fought the reprehensible policies of the FDA and the medical establishment during the worst of the AIDS crisis. It is also the story of how a man was transformed from a womanizing, homophobic redneck drunk into a compassionate, responsible hero. The story is a many ways a typical triumph over adversity story, with an obvious structure and ending, and it is also typical in most of the Hollywood stories of the early AIDS epidemic, in which straight people are the heroes and gay people the victims.

That said, Dallas Buyers Club is no Philadelphia, because Ron Woodruff is not a sanitized, perfectly acceptable protagonist like Tom Hanks’s Andrew Beckett. (I’d argue that Beckett is not that film’s hero, who was Becket’s lawyer, played by Denzel Washington.) While he ends up lovable, for much of the film, he’s, well, a jerk. And the film’s second lead, the transgender woman Rayon (Jared Leto), a composite invented by the screenwriters, is one of the most complex, interesting, and affecting characters in any of films about AIDS.

For both Woodruff and Rayon, the writers have produced funny, crass, and pointed lines and many memorable scenes, despite the prison of easy acceptability that is the screenplay’s structure. McConaughey, giving the performance of his career, lost 38 pounds for the role and delivers strings of Texasisms, angry monologues, and mountain of expletives with the gusto and emotional honesty that his last few years as a character actor have only hinted at him being capable of. For example, after Dr. Saks tells him to go to a support group, Woodruff says, “I’m dying, and you’re telling me to get a hug from a bunch of faggots.”

As great as McConaughey is, he is playing a version of McConaughey. Leto’s Rayon is a more complete and more astonishing transformation. Leto not only is unrecognizable, which has a lot to do with his make-up artists, but the depth of his characterization is to be marveled at. Warm, witty Rayon is not a saint either, and her behavior bounces back and forth between selfish and magnanimous, between sympathetic and pitiable. I don’t like how Rayon is used by the writers to make such blunt points and to be the pivot for so much of Woodruff’s transformation. But Leto took their plot device and turned it into a thing a beauty.

Much of why the movie works is the beautiful but raw direction of the French-Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée. His scenes are tightly controlled and packed with emotion, and he creates a great deal of art in his visuals, from bull riding shot through the slots of a wooden gate to a swarm of butterflies lit by flickering fluorescent lights.

Dallas Buyers Club
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Garner
At Landmark Hillcrest and La Jolla ArcLight
Rated R

 

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My 10 Favorite Movies of 2012

I saw about 75 movies in 2012, and while I saw a couple dozen that I liked a great deal, very few movies about LGBT people or queer themes were given a wide release. And that is disappointing in general, but particularly for a critic writing for a paper called San Diego LGBT Weekly. This year, the many of the “serious” movies were less concerned with identity, sexual or otherwise, than they were with history, power, revenge, and the human costs of both well-meaning and ill-advised idealism. At the heart of Lincoln is the decision to prolong the relentlessly bloody Civil War in order to pass the 13th Amendment, and Zero Dark Thirty, the best movie officially released in 2012 (which opens in San Diego on January 11), is a disturbingly amoral depiction of the search and annihilation of Osama Bin Laden. Even the best Hollywood films intent of money making were darkly cynical; The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall were exhilarating, but downers. (The Avengers and Pitch Perfect were exceptions, pretty good movies that didn’t reflect the world’s ennui.) And this means that some movies were finely, even brilliantly, crafted, but I didn’t enjoy watching them. What follows are not the 10 best movies of 2012, but rather my 10 favorite movies of 2012.

10. Hitchcock. Most assuredly, this movie is not a realistic depiction of actual events, but Anthony Hopkins does a hilarious and often poignant impersonation of the director and Helen Mirren, as his sarcastic and long-suffering wife, is subtle, arch, and sympathetic.

9. Magic Mike. Unfairly maligned for its subject matter – it’s about male strippers in Florida, after all – Magic Mike was still a Steven Soderbergh film: per usual, it was beautifully shot, tautly edited, and perfectly cast, particularly with Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum.

8. Bernie. A picturesque small town, a weird murder, bizarre and hilarious supporting characters, and a protagonist who is as gay as he is loved by the town’s little old ladies. It’s my favorite Richard Linklater film, and it is without a doubt the performance of Jack Black’s career.

7. Cabin in the Woods. Co-written by the great Joss Whedon, the film is scary, gory, and thrilling, as all horror movies should be, but it’s also ingeniously, surprisingly plotted and catch-your-breath funny.

6. Les Miserables. Russell Crowe is miscast and it’s too long, but Hugh Jackman, Eddie Redmayne, and especially Anne Hathaway make Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the great Broadway musical about love, pain, and grace in 19th century France a deeply emotional experience.

5. How to Survive a Plague. This documentary about ACT-UP and its off-shoot the Treatment Action Group features incredible found footage, insightful interviews, and a narrative that is moving, essential, and instructive.

4. Moonrise Kingdom. It’s ultimately a movie about a boy who runs away from camp to hang out with his girlfriend, but it is also a tone poem about childhood, parenting, wonder, and love. Some scenes are so beautiful they should be hung on the walls of a museum. Wes Anderson’s direction of his and Roman Coppola’s ingenious, intricately plotted script is a marvel.

3. Silver Linings Playbook. Again, David O. Russell has taken a standard genre structure – this time, the romantic comedy – and lifted it to high art with beautifully written, deeply nuanced characters and actors directed to their greatest performances. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are damaged and troubled, and watching them fall in love is redemption as entertainment.

2. The Master. Using the relationship between two men – Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a restless, somewhat disturbed, somewhat animalistic drifter, and Lancaster Doss (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charismatic, charming, and narcissistic metaphysicist — writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson explores what it means to be human, what it means to have control, and what it means to relate to other people. The resulting film is weird, disturbing, fascinating, entertaining, and profound.

1. Argo. Ben Affleck’s film about the insane plan the CIA devised (“This is the best bad idea we have”) to rescue six American embassy workers from Iran in 1980 is thrilling, funny, and nearly flawless. The merging of a satirical comedy about Hollywood, the paranoid suspense in Iran, and the wonkish, but often very funny drama of Washington, D.C. is seamlessly handled in Chris Terrio’s masterful script and Affleck’s direction of himself, his all-star cast, and the complex action sequences.

Honorably Mentioned: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Sessions, Pitch Perfect, Brave, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall, The Avengers, The Intouchables

Note: I’ve left Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained off of both lists because while they are great works of art, they are so morally and politically upsetting that I almost wish I had never seen them.

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How To Survive A Plague

An amazing movie, and I did a Q&A with its director.

Toward the end of David France’s extraordinary documentary about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, and its off-shoot the Treatment Action Group, or TAG, playwright and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer says, “We, ACT-UP, got those drugs out there. It’s the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim.” Kramer, who is notorious for his incendiary rhetoric, is not being hyperbolic. If not for ACT-UP’s constant, innovative, and angry activism in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, the speed at which the FDA and NIH developed, tested and approved drugs for HIV and AIDS would have remained snail-like, leading to even more pain, suffering and death than AIDS was already causing. Continue…

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Again, Never

This is the last scene of “Longtime Companion.” I’ve posted this on World AIDS Day before. Here it is, again. It’s a fantasy; it will never happen, of course, and it is only in the film to make you cry, to create a false catharsis that once recognized as a lie will make you very angry. And so, it is required watching. “AIDS is not over” is a cliche, but it’s repeated over and over because it’s true. People continue to die of AIDS everywhere, not just in countries where the government cannot afford to help pay for either HIV drugs or the needed healthcare infrastructure, but also in the United States, the richest country in the history of humanity, where the federal and several state governments believe it is perfectly fine to have more than 3,500 people on wait-lists for the drugs that they need to keep them alive. There is more than enough money to treat every person on the planet with HIV. However, there isn’t enough moral will to make it happen. That is what World AIDS Day means to me.

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxexUB-bYTg[/embedyt]

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