Matthew McConaughey's career transformation continues apace... Among last week's cinema releases was Out Of The Furnace, a blue collar crime drama with echoes of The Deer Hunter set in a dilapidated Rust Belt community in Pennsylvania. It featured among its cast some of contemporary cinemas most ...
Matthew McConaughey’s career transformation continues apace…
Among last week’s cinema releases was Out Of The Furnace, a blue collar crime drama with echoes of The Deer Hunter set in a dilapidated Rust Belt community in Pennsylvania. It featured among its cast some of contemporary cinemas most accomplished mumblers, each making full use of their well-honed Method skills to out-mumble one another: Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Forrest Whitaker, Sam Shephard and Willem Dafoe among them. Would that Matthew McConaughey had starred in Out Of The Furnace.
As it goes, I can’t think of any film that wouldn’t in some way be improved by the presence of McConaughey on his current form. The recent work – The Lincoln Lawyer, Killer Joe, Bernie, Mud, Magic Mike, the astonishing, 10-minute monologue about the benefits of masturbation and cocaine in The Wolf Of Wall Street – has found the actor escape the rom-com circuit to find himself in the welcome position where he is winning awards for serious dramatic work. Indeed, he is even nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, which is certainly a performance worthy of one of the greats of the New Hollywood elite.
He plays Ronald Woodroof, a real-life Texas rodeo hot shot and avid womanizer who tested H.I.V.-positive in 1985. Thinking back a decade to McConaughey in the pomp of his rom-com phase – in movies like How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days – it’s astonishing to see the transformation here. Gone is the gleaming torso, the easy-going smile and button-bright eyes. McConaughey shed 40 pounds for the part and accordingly his Woodroof is rendered as a dark, spindly skeleton. The film follows Woodroof’s simultaneous attempts to overcome the stigma of his illness – no easy task in mid-Eighties Texas – and also bring non-approved treatments to patients who have otherwise been excluded. It is a David and Goliath story of sorts, as Woodroof takes on the pharmaceutical industry and the authorities; but it is also concerned with Woodroof’s transformation from good ol’ homophobe to a more compassionate and understanding human being.
It is the credit of director Jean-Marc Vallée – and the scriptwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack – that at no point does Dallas Buyers Club drift into the saccharine. Vallée’s use of natural light and the film’s milieu – run down bars and trailer parks – recall Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Of course, this is very much McConaughey’s film – and deservedly so – but credit is also due to Jared Leto as a fellow AIDS patient and Jennifer Garner as the doctor who takes Woodroof’s side against the establishment.
Michael Bonner
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.
