The Dallas Buyers Club

“Dallas Buyers Club” uneasily combines a muckraking polemic with a buddy movie. The buddy movie is about the friendship between a homophobic substance abusing pussy-hound Matthew McConaughey) and a drag queen. The drag queen is played by Jared Leto, a performance for which the actor won an Oscar. McConaughey’s character, Ron Woodruff, a bull-riding rodeo roustabout who works in the oil fields, discovers that he has somehow contracted AIDS. He forms an unlikely alliance with the drag queen to explore treatments for HIV alternative to the experimental, and ineffective, therapy offered by the medical establishment. McConaughey is charismatic, but savagely biased against homosexuals. However, he recognizes that he needs the drag queen to establish a liaison with the local gay community to support his “buyer’s club” -- a kind of cooperative that sells medications not available in the United States (and, in many cases, banned by the FDA) to people suffering from AIDS. To the extent that the film dramatizes the relationship between the two men and depicts their efforts to discover successful forms of treatment for AIDS, the “Dallas Buyers Club” is intriguing, touching, and, even, inspirational. But much of the film is overtly polemical and this aspect of the movie raises troubling questions of veracity and, even, moral responsibility. The movie makes a very direct and defamatory allegation: big Pharma conspired with the medical profession and the FDA to foist an ineffective, even lethal, medication on desperately ill men and women. The movie claims that AZT doesn’t effectively treat AIDS and, indeed, asserts at one point that the classical symptoms of AIDS are primarily caused by this drug -- “it’s not the virus,” McConaughey’s character says, “but the medicine that debilitates and kills people.” The movie further makes the claim that something called Peptide T, when taken with vitamins and a regimen of healthy nutrition (no processed foods) controls AIDS or, at least, significantly reduces its symptoms. It’s the argument of the film that AZT was peddled to sick people to boost pharmaceutical company profits -- in the film, the medication is said to be one of the most expensive drugs ever produced. These allegations are serious indeed -- this is not science fiction and the film is not merely entertainment: rather, the subject of the movie is a plague, a deadly pestilence that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. Furthermore, the film documents a period that is now remote -- the film narrates events occurring between 1985 and 1992. So, presumably, the truth is known and can be established. Either a criminal conspiracy involving the most reckless and wicked corporate skullduggery occurred with the connivance of the medical profession and federal government or it did not. The paranoid averments made by the movie are either true, or exaggerated or partly false or wholly false -- and anyone watching this film is left with an unsettling question: is this movie based on a crackpot fantasy or is it telling us the truth? I must say that my suspicion is that the film retails a crackpot fantasy. I base this surmise on two aspects of the film: first, the movie asserts that Peptide T treats both AIDS and Alzheimer’s Syndrome -- this seems questionable to me. (In fact, Wikipedia tells me that Peptide T has shown some benefit with respect to cognitive disorders but with respect to AIDS does no better than a placebo; to the extent that AIDS symptoms include neuro-cognitive deterioration, Peptide T might be mildly beneficial.) Second, the movie hedges its bets with a final title: that title tells us that AZT proved to be effective but at lower doses than were being administered to the patients in the late eighties. This title undercuts the entire dramatic emphasis of the second half of the film, the thesis that AZT is, more or less, wholly inefficacious and, even, deadly. (There is a deleted scene incorporated as an extra on the DVD that shows the female doctor who is, more or less, McConaughey’s love interest in the film reducing her dosage of AZT to her patients by one-half -- this suggests that the film can’t really support its muckraking argument that AZT is not just worthless but lethal. But that sequence was cut from the version of the movie that was released because it would interfere with the dramatic David versus Goliath narrative of the second half of the movie -- one physically weak but morally courageous man battling the medical profession, the FDA, and the iniquitous pharmaceutical companies.) Setting aside the debate about AIDS that the film embodies, the picture is gripping and effective. McConaughy and most of the other actors in the film look sweaty, emaciated, and deathly ill. The camerawork is point-of-view, largely handheld and unobtrusive -- it doesn’t interfere with the fascinating story. The picture efficiently dramatizes the hero’s conversion from a nasty white-trash lothario into a suave, medically sophisticated big businessman. (The transformation is so swift, however, and complete as to raise some credibility issues). The female doctor who gradually sees the light about AZT is played by Jennifer Garner, an annoying one-note performance of an underwritten role: she has nothing to do but look perpetually worried. The second half of the movie, when the film’s polemical aspect dominates, is less effective than the first part of the picture. There is a court hearing, for instance, that doesn’t make any sense -- we aren’t told what’s at issue or why the matter is before the court. The movie has two bold and beautiful scenes. In one of them, the drag queen dies in a Dallas hospital while the hero, who has traveled to a Mexican medical laboratory where unconventional drugs are being compounded for AIDS treatment, enters a room filled with thousands and thousands of butterflies -- some kind of substance is being extracted from their cocoons. The butterflies alight on McConaughy as his friend dies. (Once Jared Leto’s character is defunct, the air goes out of the picture). In the final scene, the film-makers develop a powerful image for both AIDS and human mortality -- the hero is shown being strapped onto a bull and we see the animal’s fierce eye. All of us, the movie suggests, are on a bull-ride; we all get bucked-off -- it’s just a matter of how long we can hold on.