Matthew McConaughey has already had a go at hunting for gold (on film, at any rate) in 2008's Fool's Gold, where he and Kate Hudson were on the trail of a sunken Spanish galleon full of treasure. Critics were unsympathetic ("excruciatingly lame" was a fairly typical response).
Given the fractious state of American politics, perhaps it's a suitable moment for a movie taking a look back at the American Civil War. However, despite heaving at the seams with good intentions and noble sentiments, Gary Ross's Free State of Jones ultimately can't justify its debilitating 140-minute running time.
Space, the final frontier. Except that on the slowly dying earth where Christopher Nolan's often awesome sci-fi epic begins, the instinct to reach for the heavens has been crushed by the struggle for survival as crops die and life-choking dust storms sweep across the American midwest.
You could boil down the content of this new HBO import to an info-bite that reads "two detectives hunt serial killer in Louisiana", but that wouldn't give you the faintest inkling of the pace, mood or texture of what's shaping up as a remarkable chunk of television. You may find it a little slow, and the Deep South accents sometimes cry out for explanatory surtitles, but you're liable to find it seeping into your consciousness like a troubling dream you can't shake off.
Extreme physical transformation is a double-edged sword for actors. Setting aside the metabolic repercussions of shedding huge amounts of weight from an already lean frame, as Matthew McConaughey did for the role of rodeo cowboy and accidental AIDS activist Ron Woodroof, there’s a risk that the aesthetic will distract from the work.
This is a performance for which McConaughey is almost guaranteed to net the Best Actor Oscar next month, composing the highest peak yet in what has been one of the most efficient and absolute career turnarounds ever witnessed in Hollywood. It’s a full-blooded, ferocious turn, and a much-needed shot of adrenalin to the heart of Jean-Marc Vallée’s oddly staid drama.
We’re introduced to Ron days before his diagnosis with advanced AIDS in 1986, doom already writ large on McConaughey’s emaciated form. The calm before the storm unfolds in brutal, staccato snapshots: the presumed moment of his infection, his day job as an electrician interrupted by abrupt bloodshed, his eventual collapse. As a red-blooded, openly homophobic Texan and renowned “pussy addict”, Ron’s kneejerk response to his death sentence is belligerent denial, followed swiftly by proactive denial.
His never-say-die tenacity leads him into semi-inadvertent battle with the FDA – in a bid to extend his own life, he drives across the border to Mexico having been denied access to the still-in-trials drug AZT, and ends up instead with an early version of the AIDS "cocktail" still widely prescribed today. Where AZT had only landed him back in hospital, the cocktail restores him to some measure of health, and thus begins the caper movie element of Dallas Buyers Club, with Ron dreaming up increasingly inventive ways to smuggle and distribute these medications to a growing HIV-positive community.
Running alongside all this is the touching relationship between Ron and fellow patient Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender woman whose blithe sweetness gradually sands down Ron’s rougher edges. While the erosion of Ron’s bigotry isn’t always convincingly drawn – his cartoonishly thuggish friends are rolled out as less-than-subtle benchmarks – every moment between McConaughey and Leto feels genuine.
But as the film becomes more bogged down in a half-hearted morality story about federal government and a related subplot surrounding Jennifer Garner’s bland doctor Eve (pictured left), you’re left longing for more time with Leto’s achingly moving performance. Garner does nothing to improve what’s already a clunky role; spouting indignant lines like “What do the FDA know about treating patients?”, she’s a morality delivery device rather than a character, which makes her dynamic with Ron ring hollow.
It’s Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack’s script that most consistently rankles; the strangely sporadic use of title cards to mark the passage of time is symptomatic of an overall awkwardness. The thread of Ron’s motivation – much like in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the question is where the line sits between shrewd business sense and genuine philanthropy – becomes less and less well defined, but McConaughey’s work is so rigorously consistent it’s hard to notice.
Dallas Buyers Club feels closer to a wasted opportunity than a triumph, although its success in bringing a remarkable and little-told story to a wider audience must be lauded. It’s a dated, often clumsy drama buoyed by two eminently fresh and graceful performances.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Dallas Buyers Club
It was Benjamin Franklin who said "money has never made man happy...the more of it one has the more one wants," and there is no shortage of examples of boundless greed and how an abundance of cash can upturn and empty lives. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker convicted of fraud, The Wolf of Wall Street gives us one such example. This is Martin Scorsese's 23rd narrative feature and with it he proves that, at 71, he's inarguably still got it, with a flamboyantly immoral tale very much for and of our age, which is apparently the most effing foul-mouthed film in the history of cinema.
Scripted by Terence Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street sees Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) enter the weird world of Wall Street as an ambitious young pup with a devoted, darling hairdresser wife (Cristin Milioti). He's taken under the wing of a cawing, coked-up eagle played by (a show-stealing) Matthew McConaughey, who gives him some chest-beating musical mentorship over lunch in a scene to treasure. Unfortunately Belfort's timing couldn't be worse as he secures his broker's licence on 1987's Black Monday, and is immediately hoofed out of the firm.
Showing that you just can't keep a greedy prick down, and with opportunities in the big league non-existent, Belfort turns his attention to penny stocks - applying his city slicker's nous to ruthlessly rinse those who can't afford to lose even small amounts, whilst teaching his "knucklehead" friends how to do the same. One of those, Donnie (Jonah Hill, pictured above), becomes his partner in crime; he's an obese lad with "phosphorescent" teeth, married to his first cousin ("if anyone's gonna fuck my cousin that's gonna be me"), who readily admits that it's likely that his kids will be retarded. Together they turn Stratton Oakmont into a billion-dollar brokerage firm - a law unto itself, staffed by barbarians - before the FBI come a-sniffing.
Scorsese has long dealt in anti-heroes, making great use of DiCaprio over the years, and there's an obvious comparison in the similarly biographical, comparably conveyed Goodfellas. But it's interesting to note the career of the film's screenwriter Terence Winter, who rose to prominence as writer / executive producer of The Sopranos and more recently as the creator of the marvellous Boardwalk Empire (there are cameos from several Boardwalk stalwarts). They are shows that lionise criminals but simultaneously show them as greatly troubled men, who suffer the consequences of their actions in terms of their business and in the damage that's inflicted on their psyche. Both make formidable use of the lengthier, more searching character development facilitated by TV as a medium.
As with Winter's previous work, the crooks take centre stage in The Wolf of Wall Street. However, rather than ramming home a moral, or painting a conflicting picture, the film instead drills home the screw-tomorrow excess, ultimately proving itself exhaustingly brash. It's told by a man living large, conscience-free, and who is thus obnoxious, unapologetic and chaotic. For instance, the untimely deaths of friends and colleagues are skirted over - Belfort doesn't want to dwell on that - and one marriage is quickly dealt a death blow (only vaguely felt) in order to usher another sucker in (Margot Robbie's glamorous Naomi, pictured below).
The Wolf of Wall Street is said to have outraged and appalled senior Academy members at recent awards screenings and it's a film which screams in your face that it's having fun, almost as if the filmmakers themselves are on something: Scorsese's pumped-up orchestration, Rodrigo Prieto's carnival-like visuals, Thelma Schoonmaker's energetic editing and Winter's potty-mouthed poetry fuse to form an appropriate evocation of a life cranked up to 11.
It's a film that's huge amounts of fun, but there is a message in there: in the very hollowness, cruelty and precariousness of Belfort's existence, he's living a twisted version of the American dream, presenting a middle finger to both its people and the system, and it's just up to you whether to choose to see it. As the laughs and inebriated antics get wearing - and they do - you might notice that the lines on DiCaprio's baby face mirror the cracks in his marriage. Yet just one sequence bears the hallmarks of anything resembling conventional filmic morality - it's a punch in the gut, quite literally, wiping the smile off our faces and making clear our complicity in this act and all that's gone before. It comes as a shock and is almost more powerful for its isolation.
The film's portrayal of women is, to be honest, pretty troubling. No doubt Scorsese and co are making a point about a world where women are routinely demeaned, or expected to accept the objectification of their gender (and by such mediocre men!) Despite this, it remains dispiriting that the film chooses to channel Belfort in this particular respect, reducing its most prominent female Naomi to nowt but a sex-pot, gold-digger, and reckless mother. Belfort might be no better than a reptile himself but, as played by an on-fire DiCaprio, he can at least be horribly charming and hilarious - a scene where he suffers the delayed effects of some very old prescription medication is likely to see off all-comers for the most hysterical sequence of 2014.
With appearances from Joanna Lumley and The Artist's Jean Dujardin providing the cherries on an already very overloaded knickerbocker glory, it's a feast of sorts. Scorsese and Winter have, quite deliberately, made a movie that for a long time is easy to chuckle at and guzzle down but, like its protagonist, is ultimately hard to like. But whether it's a begrudging or emphatic embrace, you just can't deny their chutzpah.
MORE MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Taxi Driver (1976). Talking to me? Scorsese's classic starring Robert De Niro (pictured) is restored and re-released on its 35th anniversary
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
Hugo (2011). Scorsese does a Spielberg in sumptuous look at the origins of cinema
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street
There are few films of which you can say there's something for everyone - but there is something for everyone in Jeff Nichols's third film.
"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime.
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical.
In Magic Mike the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh turns his camera on the “cock-rocking kings of Tampa”, and the result is one of the most eye-wateringly entertaining and surprisingly stylish movies of the year. With more thrust than a jumbo jet and more packages than the Royal Mail will handle this Christmas, thank God they didn’t release it in 3D.