Dallas Buyers Club

Twenty five days of shooting and five million dollars, with a makeup budget of two hundred and fifty dollars that nonetheless won an Academy Award. Those numbers describe a method rather than a limitation. Illness is carried by bodies and not by prosthetics: Matthew McConaughey dropped from one hundred and eighty three pounds to one hundred and thirty six, and Jared Leto said he simply stopped eating to take the weight off faster. Jean-Marc Vallée shot everything on natural light, handheld, with two lenses, which is why there is almost no wide shot of a hospital anywhere in it. The camera stays at face height and the result works as a performance piece instead of an issue picture. There is also no score. Scenes end without a musical cue to mark the feeling, and a viewer accustomed to being told when to be moved may read that as flatness. The most useful thing to know sits in the screenplay. The friendship at the centre is invented. Rayon is a composite assembled from interviews with patients and activists, with no single real counterpart, and Woodroof himself is described in accounts as bisexual, which makes the opening homophobia a constructed arc. Craig Borten interviewed Woodroof in 1992 and the script took two decades to reach a screen.