Film Carew: Dallas Buyers Club, Labor Day

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

“I'm dying, and you're telling me to go get a hug from a bunch of faggots?” glowers Matthew McConaughey, an electrician, part-time black-market bookie, small-time dealer, and rodeo-hustler who's fallen off the oil derricks and into the AIDS ward at a mid-'80s Dallas hospital. At first, he's in denial about being infected with “that Rock cock-suckin' Hudson bullshit”, but once his dive-bar buddies turn on him and he's evicted from his trailer-park shack (which he responds to by blowing open its door with a shotgun!), McConaughey is forced to confront reality: he may only have 30 days to live, and denial is a shortcut to the grave. And, so, All-American audiences are invited to relate to AIDS by way of a staunchly-hetero, hyper-masculine victim. It seems like a problematic premise, but Dallas Buyers Club subverts what could've been an awful, Oscar-chasing issue movie; its inspired choice of leading man and unexpected choice of director - Québécois DJ-as-director Jean-Marc Vallée - giving the film twin sources of restless, electric energy.

Vallée (maker of C.R.A.Z.Y. and Café de Flore) does what he does: forever moving his roaming, wandering camera; turning time and again to pop-song montage; using that movement and sound to create a sensation of disorientation; and delighting in the kitsch of a past era (Microfiche at the library! Smokin' in the hospital!). But McConaughey doesn't just lean on the familiar; instead, his unhinged, high-voltage turn plays against what once held as his Golden Boy archetype. Matty Mac the bongo-poppin' beefcake is nowhere to be seen: instead he rather resembles a half-starved rat, scrawny and diseased but scrambling with a wild survival-instinct. The match of this driven desperation - and the character's unashamedly profane ways - with twinkles of the McConaughey charm gives the performance a sense of tension, and pleasing complexity; the Oscar-nominated turn playing against type whilst playing up the actor's movie-star-ness.

What dramatically results is a caper-comedy tinged with tragedy; a smirkin', semi-ironic spin on the crime-saga, in which McConaughey is the upwardly-mobile drug-dealer smuggling suitcases - not of narcotics, but unapproved pharmaceuticals - over the border, and thumbing his nose at flailin' and failin' John Q. Laws. His partner-in-crime is Jared Leto, in a transgender turn as a Marc Bolan-obsessed, Bradford Cox-dating, unexpectedly-religious junkie; a performance already earmarked for Oscar favouritism. They're the original Odd Couple! - the Cowboy and the Queen, and they quickly settle into a routine of old-marrieds, all lovingly-mocking banter and passive-aggressive bickering. McConaughey becomes a reformed redneck, retiring his homophobic hatreds, becoming a born-again anti-drug zealot, an evangelist of eating non-processed food, of clean-living and body-science. At first he's but a businessman - membership in his Buyers Club $400 per annum, or you get nothing - but his hard heart eventually softens; for Leto, for maternal doctor Jennifer Garner, and for all those misfit souls trying to survive a plague.

"This is how you put someone in a sleeper hold, son."

LABOR DAY

“Help me put a roof on this house!” commands Josh Brolin, the unflappable voice of masculine resourcefulness, here to bring shaky-handed, frowny-faced, depressed Kate Winslet back to life, via the sweet arts of pie-bakin'. Brolin's straddling her in classic this-is-how-you-hold-a-pool-cue fashion, and the 'roof' in question is the top layer of freshly-rolled pastry on a home-made peach pie (Winslet, depressed person that she is, having been about to just throw all those ripe peaches out already). The symbolism is comically obvious: Brolin may be an escaped convict on the lam, but he's here to make this house a home. Winslet's been shacked up with her solitary son, Gattlin Griffith, in a creepily-sexual domestic dependency, where he plays husband and she tells him less about the birds and the bees, more how it feels when you're fucking and your skin's on fire. Griffith's the one who makes the coffee and breakfast-in-bed, puts the car in reverse, and does the banking; but if this house is gonna be a home, this boy needs a man.

And Brolin is a man's man: no sooner does he take MILF-and-teen hostage in their mythical small town America house, than he's changing fuses and tyres, waxing floors and fixing fences, playing catch and dancing the rumba (all whilst apparently “in hiding”). And no sooner has he shown Winslet how to make a pie - fingers smooshed together in dough like they're unironically recreating the pottery-wheel scene from Ghost - than he's showing her how to make sweet love; whilst her creepy kid eavesdrops from the other side of the door, listening to the steady, relaxing rhythm of the runaway inmate boning Mom.

When the film airs towards that creepiness - Griffith conflating cute girls at school with mama in a wet-dream sequence; Tobey Maguire's Gatsby-flashback voiceovers adding to the Freudian complexity - there's a certain something here; something that carries over from the pages of Joyce Maynard's book, from which onetime-golden-boy Jason Reitman is adapting Labor Day.

But the romantic melodrama fares not so well, despite the evocative heave of Kate Winslet's bosom. Its central dramatic device is flimsy in the face of logic; its answers to inevitable questions are often problematic. As in the artfully-sprayed flashbacks to Brolin's B-grade-Terrence-Malick youth, where he silently cavorts with Maika Monroe, building towards the revelation as to why Brolin's serving an 18-year stint for murder. Spoiler alert: she was asking for it. This reveal theoretically exonerates Brolin in the audience's hearts; he guilty in the court of law but innocent in our hearts. It's as wildly presumptuous as the film's very premise is preposterous; a misjudged belief that symbolises the misjudged whole.