"Dallas Buyers Club" and "Mud" Justify the McConaissaince

It's that damn McConaughey. He's so hot right now!

Considering Matthew McConaughey’s recent Oscar win, the fervor surrounding True Detective and his lead part in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, it’s apparent that we are in the eye of the McConaissaince. As a result, this seems a perfect time to finally put together some thoughts on Dallas Buyers Club and Mud, two 2013 entries I enjoyed quite a bit but never got around to reviewing. I figure it's definitely a good idea to strike before the McConalash sets in.

As a long-time McConaughey defender, I've enjoyed every minute of his comeback. It’s been funny to see the reactions of so many people who had previously written him off solely based on a few paycheck gigs in hollow romantic comedies. Guy always had screen presence to burn, and although he’s limited in some ways by an unshakable accent, he actually operates within a pretty wide range.

At the Oscars, Ellen joked that McConaughey is dirty pretty, but that’s actually an accurate description of his general movie persona. He possesses an oily magnetism that naturally suggests a seedy slickster or a morally compromised antihero, but then there’s the likable swagger and the intense vulnerability bubbling under the surface. He’s sort of a new age Michael Douglas, albeit with a six pack and a Texas twang.

McConaughey deviates from that wheelhouse occasionally (i.e. Contact, Amistad and The Wedding Planner), but like many good actors, he’s found his greatest success by playing into and off of his stock archetype. That assessment is certainly true of Dallas Buyers Club and Mud.

Dallas Buyers Club is a biopic about Ron Woodroof, a homophobic, womanizing good old boy who contracted AIDS in the early ’80s back when it was largely looked at as a gay disease. When Ron realizes the U.S. medical system and the ass-backwards FDA can’t help him, he decides to go south of the border to gain access to unapproved drugs. Soon, with the help of a transvestite partner named Rayon (Jared Leto), he begins smuggling the drugs into America and selling them to fellow AIDS sufferers as part of a monthly membership called the Dallas Buyers Club.

Leto and McConaughey lost a lot of weight for Dallas Buyers Club.

It’s interesting to me that this film languished so long in developmental limbo, because, beyond the topic of AIDS, it’s basically a conventional David vs. Goliath movie, one I suspect most would enjoy if they could get past their discomfort with what they perceive as “gay themes.” The film casts a critical eye on the FDA for being in bed with Big Pharmaceutical Companies to the detriment of the public, but it’s mostly an inspirational character piece about personal growth, redemption and the strength of the human spirit. A large part of the narrative hangs on the growing friendship that develops between Ron and Rayon, and it is all reminiscence of the similarly affecting dynamic Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks shared in Philadelphia.

The film starts like a bat out of hell and then gets into a comfortable rhythm before basically petering out. There’s a structural imbalance to the film, but it is buoyed by an excellent cast that includes winning support from Jennifer Garner, Steve Zahn and Griffin Dunn. McConaughey and Leto both won Oscars for their transformative performances, and while I probably wouldn't have gone with either of them in the stacked year that was 2013, the awards are well deserved. Leto does about everything he can to make Rayon into more than a walking plot device, and McConaughey owns the screen. I know some were annoyed McConaughey rode his comeback story to a victory on Oscar night, particularly at the expense of Leonardo DiCaprio, but this performance feels more charged and awards worthy than those by recent winners like Colin Firth and Jean Dujardin.

Although Dallas Buyers Club received the bulk of the attention, Mud is actually the more interesting McConaughey film to be released last year. Steeped in southern lore and magical realism and populated by a community of river dwellers, Mud instantly recalls last year’s excellent Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it is largely a homage to the works of Mark Twain. There are stand-ins for Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, and there’s even a character named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), which the internet tells me is the name of the man who inspired Huck Finn. The film even has the feel of classic American literature due to its poetic atmosphere, thematic parallels and rampant symbolism (one could easily imagine a term paper on the significance of the titular character’s shirt or the evocative image of a boat lodged high in a tree).

McConaughey plays Mud, a fugitive wanted for murder and hiding out in the aforementioned boat on a deserted island in the Mississippi River. When Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Loffland), two tween boys from Arkansas, encounter him on an exploratory adventure, Mud makes them a deal. If they’ll bring him food and help him make contact with his long lost love Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), he’ll gift them his pistol and grant them the squatter’s rights to the boat. Neckbone is intrigued by the pistol, while Ellis is mostly captivated by the romance of it all.

Ellis takes center stage for much of the story, and the film is ultimately a fable about a boy coming to grips with the mad complexities of love. He’s struggling with both the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and his infatuation with an older girl, and in Mud he seems to a have found a kindred romantic soul. He holds out hope that the connection between Mud and Juniper can confirm his faith in love, which can often seem like a cruel joke in the way it melds euphoria with abject disappointment.

The three lead characters of Mud would fit right into a Twain novel.

There’s a lot going on in the film, and writer/director Jeff Nichols juggles most of it very well. While we see the entirety of Ellis’ relationship with his crush, the dynamic between his parents (Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon) is fragmented and the one between Mud and Juniper isn't on screen at all. We see what Ellis sees and understand as he understands, and it speaks to the mastery of what Nichols has done that confusing character motivations on the part of some of the adults (especially the women) come into sharp focus as the film reaches its conclusion.

If there’s a misstep, it’s in the inclusion of a subplot involving Neckbone’s uncle. While it allows Nichols regular Michael Shannon to log some screen time, the whole thing feels inconsequential and adds unnecessary bloat to a film that would've been well served by cleaving off 10 minutes.

The below the line aspects are all top notch, and there’s some really great and subtle acting on display here. Both kids give emotive lived-in performances, and Witherspoon does well with a tricky role, striking the right balance as a woman intrigued by grand romanticism, but ultimately reticent and skeptical. And as was the case in Out of the Furnace (reviewed here), Shepard gets to be an old bad ass, but this time he gets a bit more of an opportunity to flex his acting muscles.

As for McConaughey, I’d argue that outside of Rust Cole, this is the greatest performances he’s ever given. There are so many seemingly conflicting things to play here – hope, regret, deception, honor, disgrace, warmth, danger, desperation –and he does it all with such nuance, taking what is a pretty mythical character and grounding him in palpable reality. Nichols has said he wrote the role with McConaughey in mind, and that’s easy to believe. Mud is an excellent showcase for McConaughey’s charisma and chops, and the film even contains a meta joke about being shirtless that is somehow weaved into the fabric of the character.

Like McConaughey’s performance, Mud has an organic quality to it that makes it easy to overlook as merely good at first. But then it lingers in the mind, growing in stature the more you ruminate on it. There’s so much to love here – the themes, the tone, the performances, the cinematography, the music, the iconography. This film is literally overflowing with riches. My favorite takeaway was the shootout toward the end of the picture, a set piece that overcomes its clichéd nature through sheer excellence in staging and visceral impact. When a coming-of-age drama succeeds on so many levels that it even contains my favorite action scene of the year – well, that’s pretty neat.

Dallas Buyers Club B, Mud A-

Magic Mike Effectively Straddles the Line Between Camp and Art



This pictures captures the first of many, many stripping scenes.

With Magic Mike, director Steven Soderbergh and producers Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin (who star and write, respectively) pull a pretty neat trick.

This is a male stripper movie headed up by Tatum and Matthew McConaughey, and it delivers the goods promised in the trailers. Unsurprisingly, it’s bound to repel straight men, while also providing guilty pleasure to countless women (and gay men) hoping to ogle, hoot and holler with a group of friends.* 

* This really is the type of movie you want to see in a packed theater. In my theater, groups of women and gay men were out in droves and their good natured glee was infectious. Even better: the response of a straight man that came unaware of what he was in for. Somewhere in the middle of the first stripping sequence, when a character disrobed to a thong and jiggled their ass at the camera, he stood up, screamed "Hell no!” and marched out of the theater. Laughter followed.

At the same time, this is a Soderbergh film, and although he doesn’t shy away from offering the audience multiple helpings of manmeat, he also injects Magic Mike with his patented clinical approach and indie sensibilities. The end result is a fun raunchy romp that simultaneously plays as a dark and shrewdly observed slice of life that is as revealing in its details and character moments as it is in its lively and numerous stripping sequences.

The movie tells a pretty simple and formulaic story. Mike (Tatum) is a self-described entrepreneur who has his hands in a variety of businesses in the hopes of raising enough money to eventually start his own custom furniture business. His main source of income just so happens to come from his role as Magic Mike, one of the "cock-rocking kings of Tampa" at Xquisite, a male strip club owned by stripper mentor and emcee Dallas (McConaughey).

In his seven years as a stripper, Mike’s only saved $13,000 toward his dream, but he has created a portfolio, moved into a fairly luxurious pad, and led a high partying lifestyle that includes, as we see in his introductory scene, three-way flings with fuckbuddy  Joanna (Olivia Munn)** and random girls whose names neither can recall. 

** Guys wary of all the male skin, may be interested in the fact that the popular Munn does show off her assets in an early scene (they are displayed shortly after Tatum shows off his behind).

While working his roof tiling gig, Mike befriends Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a 19-year-old who threw away a football scholarship and is now adrift and crashing on the couch of his sister Brooke (Cody Horn). Mike eventually takes the kid under his wing, and it isn’t long before he’s impressed Dallas and joined the crew of Xquisite, alongside Mike and the likes of Ken (White Collar’s Matt Bomer), Big Dick Richie (True Blood’s Joe Manganiello),Tarzan (former wrestler Kevin Nash), and Tito (CSI: Miami’s Adam Rodriguez).

As the story progresses, we see Mike toying with the idea of life after stripping, pursuing his business interests and falling for the straight laced Brooke, all the while Adam begins to venture further and further down a sordid path that not only includes stripping, but also druggy sexual encounters and even some ecstasy dealing.



A girl fails to resist the charms of the guy who brought her kid

brother into the world of stripping and drug use.



The narrative setup isn’t exactly original, but the dialogue and characters are finely written and the execution so assured that there’s no mistaking this for a gender-reversed Showgirls. The film, which is reportedly inspired by Tatum’s previous life as a male stripper, really embraces the little details, showing Mike in a quiet moment flattening crumpled dollar bills or a bespectacled Bick Dick Richie working on a thong with a sewing machine.

It also offers Tatum, who impressed earlier this year in 21 Jump Street, his best role to date. Hollywood is starving for a young movie star, and given the 2012 he’s had and the projects on his upcoming slate, the quickly rising star may be it. Like Brad Pitt and George Clooney before him, he started his career as a sex symbol, but has consistently sought to grow as an actor, seeking out interesting projects, many of which have been headed by fantastic directors. None of them have been better than Soderbergh (who, incidentally helped legitimize Clooney as a big screen force), and it’s worth noting that he saw enough in Tatum when working on Haywire, to work with him on his last two theatrical releases before his much-discussed retirement/break from film.

Tatum rises to the challenge and really digs in with a winning performance that exploits and fine-tunes the laidback charm and restless vulnerability he’s showcased in his better roles. What really makes the performance is how effortless and naturalistic Tatum comes across, whether he’s donning a suit and glasses to talk equity with a loan officer, break dance stripping in the club (displaying moves kept under wraps since his breakthrough role in Step Up), or falling over his words as he tries to convince Brooke (and himself) that he “is not his lifestyle.”

The question of whether or not Mike is, in fact, his lifestyle provides the backbone of the story. He talks about starting his own business and works hard, and yet he’s still living vicariously and has only saved $13,000 in seven years. For a guy brining in several hundred a night tax free, that’s not exactly a lot of money. We’re told Mike has bad credit (and thus can’t get a bank loan), so the implication is that he, like Adam, may have made some dumb decisions when he was a young, wide-eyed party animal and has fallen into a slippery slope situation. 

McConaughey is awesome.

If Adam is the Mike of days gone by, Dallas is set up as what lies ahead for Mike if he doesn’t get off his current course. Dallas is a successful and astute business man, but he’s also a self-deifying blowhard who relishes his seedy existence. While everyone around him gets plenty of chances to strip on the catwalk, the movie wisely saves McConaughey’s big number for the film’s final moments, setting it as the backdrop during which Mike decides whether or not to withdraw himself from such an undesirable future.

The key supporting players are strong.  Pettyfer understates the melodrama nicely, while Horn, despite getting stuck playing the nag, grounds the film and displays excellent chemistry with Tatum. Meanwhile McConaughey, who has unjustly gotten a reputation as a bad actor due to years of mailing it in with generic romantic comedies, reminds how sly a performer he can be, offering up an interpretation that is equal parts magnetic, hilarious, creepy, and delusional. This is a bold performance that literally peaks with McConaughey bending over in from of the camera, and the fact that he was willing to put himself out there, while also delivering on the acting front, is laudable.

Tech aspects are excellent across the board. Serving as his own DP, Soderbergh employs a sepia-tinged filter and offers up some pretty atypical shot selections. Some of these are beautifully evocative and disarming, but the most memorable uses a widescreen frame to depict Adam stumbling upon Big Dick Ritchie fluffing himself prior to a performance (leave it to a craftsman like Soderbergh to shoot a demonstration of penis enlargement both humorously and artfully). 

Having said all of that, the movie isn’t perfect. It’s at least 10 minutes too long, and while almost every scene has a refreshing authenticity, Adam’s first few scenes in the club (particularly the one that necessitates he must go on stage) are silly and poorly constructed. 

And although the casting director deserves plaudits for brining in an eclectic group of beefcakes (particularly Manganiello who has become a major object of lust for the many True Blood fans and Boomer who’s probably one of the most popular gay icons out there right now), they are vastly underused. Initially, I suspected the movie would give them something to do (the first scene with the crew is funny and the roles feel lived in), but they devolve into nothing more than window dressing. Surprisingly, it’s Nash who leaves the greatest impression, injecting a Mickey Rourkeian vibe into his role as Tarzan.

Soderbergh and Tatum will team up for a third time in next

February's The Bitter Pill.



Overall, this is a really strong effort from all involved. There’s obviously a level of camp to the film, and most of the plot beats are formulaic, but the care put into the characters, dialogue, acting and craft aspects enable to film to transcend the core material. It’s a simple story with familiar themes, but Soderbergh and Tatum really hit it out of the park. Their next team up, The Bitter Pill, will see them working with a script from frequent Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Burns (The Informant, Contagion), as well as a cast that includes Jude Law, Catherine Zeta Jones and Rooney Mara (in her first performance her Oscar-nominated turn in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). The film his theaters in eight months, and seeing what the duo has accomplished here, I’m anxiously anticipating it. A