All the Lonely People

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children;
those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey

There are certain very good films that one is hesitant to recommend because of how difficult they are to watch. They are films about every day, ordinary people who live and suffer in what Humphrey in the cited quote calls “the shadows of life”; their plight is not unusual and their numbers are larger than we’d care to admit. These are the movies about the darker sides of our society that haunt us because we know they exist, yet wish we could forget that they do. We can’t; not without dehumanizing ourselves.

Such a movie is The Dallas Buyers Club, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, with the awe inspiring acting by Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey. In brief, the movie is about a bigot; a rather lonely, very dissolute, trailer-living electrician who is diagnosed with AIDS and, since it takes place in 1985, is pretty much “sentenced to die” in a month’s time. His diagnosis ends up being a turning point in many ways and he begins to work around the medical and pharmaceutical establishment to buy himself time and a life. He does this with the unlikely partnership of a transvestite, played with remarkable realism by Mr. Leto.

 

Jared Leto in The Dallas Buyers Club

Jared Leto is an actor that lives his role with such passion, with such adherence to the part he is playing, that it sometimes feel as if we are watching a documentary. He already astounded us in another film of this type, Darren Aronofsky’s very dark Requiem for a Dream. In that movie he played a drug addict as well, the son of a working class family which is slowly falling into a social abyss. Ellen Burstyn played his mother in Requiem and despite how well Jared Leto acts in that movie, it is totally dispassionate to state that she outshines him completely. Ms. Burstyn shows us what acting is about in Requiem for a Dream. 

Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream

The movie also served to confirm that the Hollywood establishment is one that would like to pretend that the people living in the shadows of life do not exist. Requiem did not receive any major nominations except for Ms. Burstyn’s acting. Jared Leto and Aronofsky were not nominated at all, and, in one of its most shameful and unfair decisions ever, the Academy chose to give Julia Roberts the Best Actress award instead of awarding Ms. Burstyn’s awe inspiring acting; it’s hard to think of someone less deserving to have beaten Ellen Burstyn in that category! That year, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, nominated for Before Night Falls, another movie about those marginal, albeit in Cuban society, also did not win the Best Acting award.

 

Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream

Many of the kind of movies we are talking about, those that take us to the shadows, those that denounce the abandonment our society is capable of, are now made by independent film makers. With the industry side of film making becoming more and more dominant over the artistic side, it is harder to find directors employed by the larger studio systems that are willing to make them. Hollywood used to be more willing to take the monetary risk to make these films that denounce and educate. In the late sixties, famous movie directors like Sidney Pollack and John Schleisinger made movies like They Shoot Horses Don’t They, or Midnight Cowboy (respectively), with actors like Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman bringing the lonely people to the forefront. Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is probably one of the last of these so very hard to watch movies that took the major awards, winning 5 Oscars in 1976. That year, Sidney Lumet was nominated as Best Director for another Best Film contender, Dog Day Afternoon, a strong social commentary about other people left behind by our society.

 

John Cazale and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon

The directing in The Dallas Buyers Club is strong as well, although the acting is certainly what stands out. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has already received many accolades for his earlier films, like C.R.A.Z.Y. a family drama about a young gay man and his relationship to his siblings and father, The Young Victoria, which received 3 Academy Award nominations in 2009, and Café de Flore, in 2011, which also received much praise and many awards.


It is our hope that this year films like The Dallas Buyers Club and Fruitvale Station, which are smaller budget films, but ones that give voice to the silent, forgotten and lonely people of our world, will join 12 Years a Slave and Captain Phillips on the Academy Awards’ ballot. Well made movies about life, every part of it, no matter how hard to watch, should receive the light they deserve.