TIFF 2013: McConaughey’s ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ reaches next destination
TORONTO -- You might have thought that the effects of extreme weight loss was the greatest challenge for “The Dallas Buyers Club” star Matthew McConaughey as he tackled the role of Ron Woodroof, the homophobic electrician who became an unlikely pioneer for alternative AIDS treatments in the 1980s. Turns out that wasn’t the case.
“I had plenty of energy,” the actor, who dropped nearly 50 pounds for the part, told an audience at the movie’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night. What he didn’t have, at least at the beginning, was a fix on how to handle his character’s volatile emotional states.
“Ron’s dealing with different variations of rage. I’m much more of a diplomat myself,” he said, grinning.
Woodroof is, indeed, anything but diplomatic, mouthing off at anyone he believes has crossed him — including but not limited to the doctors he disagrees with, the former friends who turn against him after his diagnosis and even his business partners and allies — even as his character finds sweetness beneath all that vinegar. On stage, McConaughey won over audiences with his charm, the charm that could turn — and this is one of the piquant questions around the film -- a difficult piece into something far more accessible to mainstream audiences.
Those audiences will see something that hardly got to them easily. It took more than 20 years to bring “Dallas Buyers” to the screen, as chronicled in this Times piece a few weeks back. On Saturday night, that journey reached its next stop, with the film playing to a packed and appreciative crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival on its way to a buzzy commercial rollout in November.
The fact-based film tracks Woodroof, who was given 30 days to live by doctors in the mid-1980s when his HIV diagnosis first came in. But his survival instinct kicks in, and then his entrepreneurial spirit does the same. Before long, Woodroof is importing unapproved medicines from various overseas countries as an alternative to the FDA-sanctioned AZT, which he thinks is poison.
Along the way he also forms some unlikely bonds, including with the AIDS-afflicted Rayon, a cross-dresser who becomes Woodroof’s ally because of his access to the gay community, to whom Woodroof of course wants to peddle the new treatments. (It should be noted the while Woodroof was real, Rayon was fictional, created by screenwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack.)
INTERACTIVE: From Toronto to the Oscars?
As directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, the film has an arty presentation — it’s light on music, even lighter on lighting (there is none that isn’t ambient) and eschews a traditional three-act structure for its of character and story. And yet all that only helps it cohere into a more powerful whole.
Much will be written about the film in the coming weeks -- about the way Hollywood has decided to approach AIDS 20 years after “Philadelphia” (with a lot less easy sentiment), about what this movie has to say about Big Pharma, about how the culture has and continues to view the AIDS crisis, about the cast.
One of the great revelations in the film is Jared Leto, in a major feature for the first time in more than five years. Leto, who was in character the entire length of the five-week shoot, balances the showiness of the role with the more subtle humanity, and the crowd demonstrated its appreciation Saturday (More on him in a separate story later on.) Jennifer Garner provides plenty of emotional ballast herself as Woodroof’s doctor, who is asked to question the way the establishment is approaching AIDS.
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And of course there’s McConaughey. On the set of the movie in December, the actor told The Times that the lack of calories didn’t bother him because of the added mental clarity. “Once you get past the initial hunger you’re just clearer, he said as he stood in a Louisiana strip club shooting a scene. “Everything’s clearer.”
What also has become clear is just how subsumed into a character he can become. Like the AIDS crisis itself, McConaughey is an actor that prestige Hollywood didn’t pay close attention to for many years. With this film, both those things are bound to change.
ALSO:
‘The Dallas Buyers Club,’ the AIDS film no one wanted to make
TIFF 2013: With ‘Bad Words,’ Jason Bateman starts new chapter
‘Railway Man’ and ‘The Dallas Buyers Club’ are dark bookends for a day
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