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.
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. |
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. |
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.
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