DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, & THE OSCARS

This year's Oscars see a number of good, but not great movies, battling for prizes, and one of the the best battles will come in the best actor category, where Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew McConaughey would appear to be the presumptive favourites, overshadowing what might be Christian Bale's strongest performance in years, a popular comedic turn by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a valedictory trip for the inestimable Bruce Dern. And that's not even considering the snub for Robert Redford's almost wordless carrying of All Is Lost. Maybe it's because Tom Hanks got there first?

Dallas Buyers Club is a picture built around McConaughey's performance, and much of that is playing against Jared Leto, who seems odds-on favourite for the supporting actor statuette. But behind those two star takes, it's easy to miss the fact that there isn't much of a movie there, more like the embryo of a TV movie of the week.

McConaughey plays Ron Woodruff, an electrician and rodeo hanger-on who contracted HIV and set up his 'Buyers Club' to circumvent regulations that prevented patients first from getting AZT, which was being trialled, and then, after AZT was approved but found by many patients like Woodruff to be ineffective, from getting other medicines that would help fight the disease's symptoms.

The film has two story arcs. One is Woodruff's own coming to terms with the disease, and with the opprobrium, from his friends and from the general public, most of which stems from the idea that they think of him as gay, which he isn't. This is something resolved through his relationship with Leto's Rayon, a pre-op transexual also HIV positive, and his own gradual acceptance of the wider community. This one works brilliantly—McConaughey's Woodruff's catches all the bigotry, the violence, and the insecurity in the character, and perhaps the most moving scene in the film is when Rayon dresses as a man to visit her father, a banker, and beg money to help Ron's business.

But the other arc, the Buyer's Club itself, is more problematic. The story becomes a steady cycle of Ron getting bad news, fighting it, running afoul of authority, briefly outsmarting authority, and then losing again. This repeats until Ron finally loses his court case against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but is welcomed back to his clinic as if he has won. The villains in the piece are doctors, customs agents, and the FDA, and while the film shows their motivation in protecting their profitable control of medication, it skates around the more interesting issue of how Ron actually functioned. The film realises this; it ends with Ron finally riding a bull, and the metaphor is clear—he was engaged in a struggle, for life as well as for success against authority, that was much like riding a bull: the aim is to stay on as long as you can, but few can stay on forever.

He uses disguises to smuggle drugs, and he plays fast and loose with the idea of his business. But early on in the movie, we've seen that Ron is a hustler—he welches on a bet at the rodeo, and fakes his own arrest to get away from the guys he has cheated. The film never deals with much ambiguity in Ron's Club; how much of it is a hustle? There is no question he uses Rayon as his entry point, so to speak, into the HIV community, and there are some scenes with him in disguise as he smuggles, but overall the story becomes one of Ron turning into a good person through his struggles against the disease.

You can see the TV movie aspect most clearly in the casting of Jennifer Garner, paled into seriousness by makeup, as a composite figure of doctors opposed to the establishment's monopoly focus and control of AZT. She also exists as a love interest of sorts (watch the movie's trailer) to remind the audience that Ron isn't really gay. There's also a fine small bit by Griffin Dunne as the outcast doctor in Mexico from whom Ron learns of and sources alternative treatments.

But the focus of the film is on McConaughey's performance, and it is formidable. Oscar loves actors playing characters with disease or disability; Oscar loves characters on the 'right' side of issues; Oscar loves actors who make impressive changes in their bodies to play a role (and occasionally accepts prostheses as well). All of which bodes well for McConaughey—but isn't meant to belittle his performance. He gets the smaller parts of the character in subtle ways, the bow-legged walk, the inflated swagger, the deflated frustration. Oddly, though, this may not even be his best performance of the year, though it is the most attention-getting and that may be his biggest Oscar trump card—McConaughey is very hot, and very good right now.

Ejiofor has the advantage in playing the lead in just the sort of movie whose worthiness Oscar also loves, and the smaller advantage of taking the Oscar voters by surprise. Which again is not to demean his performance, which is Oscar worthy, as much to point out that handicapping an award for something as subjective as 'best actor' relies on analysis of the more subjective elements influencing Oscar voters.

OPTING FOR THE REAL: IN MEMORIAM KAREN BLACK

'People were opting for the real in the Seventies. People wanted to see the human heart and soul right in front of them.' -Karen Black

In an era of interchangeable pinups with blownup lips and botoxed faces, Karen Black's analysis of what made her such a remarkable actress at her very busy peak is telling. In fact, she may give too much credit to the filmmakers, and not enough to herself, because she was often the best thing in imperfectly judged projects, always giving her characters something that we, the audience, could recognise. There was nothing symmetric or regular about her features, but to look into those wandering eyes, especially when they were focused beyond the screen, on you, was to feel all the thrill and danger of real life and real love. On the dark side of a world celebrating newfound freedoms, she was the poster child for real people's vulnerability.

Karen Black projected real. She was smart, but she could play dumb, or better, play 'real people'- a category of character which Hollywood traditionally has ignored, or at best bent to its own perceptions ('tales of ordinary working people portrayed by rich Hollywood stars,' as the Firesign Theatre had it). She's best remembered for a number of roles in which she is an under-educated working-class woman whose innate knowledge makes her smarter than the men who use her. Think of Rayette in Five Easy Pieces, the perfect foil to Jack Nicholson's self-indulgent pianist, trying to find a 'real' life; she had played the hooker in Easy Rider, and Nicholson would cast her in his directorial debut, Drive, He Said, where as a bored faculty wife her intelligence came to the fore. She would also reprise Rayette in Cisco Pike, helping Kris Kristofferson's film debut, in a film where everyone else seems to be reprising older roles too.

She is brilliant as Myrtle Wilson, a trapped Rayette, in the unjustly derided 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, hugely superior to the over-hyped Baz Luhrman glitterfest. Oddly, much of the criticism for that film came from Jack Clayton's making it look so beautiful, which is about the only thing Luhrman's version has going for it. But Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay is sharp (Coppola cast Black in their mutual film debut, the overlooked You're A Big Boy Now, arguably Hollywood's first look at Sixties generational change—it was made before The Graduate but released after it) Black's Myrtel and Scott Wilson's George Wilson are real people, and they contrast with the equally real upper-class indifference of Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan. Her Faye Greener, in The Day Of The Locust, is a successful variant of the same character; John Schlesinger's film was also criticised in 1975, but in retrospect it too stands up pretty well as an adaptation of Nathanel West's novel—if anything it to tried to catch the image of the era, where Black and many of the rest of the cast were busy catching the soul, or lack thereof, of Hollywood.

So it was strange that none of the many obituaries mentioned her role as Bett in The Outfit, John Flynn's 1973 adaptation of a Richard Stark novel. She's Rayette again, but she's paired with Robert Duvall's thief Macklin. She's wearing a beret before Gatsby, and the relationship is real within the limited bounds of their world. There is a truly touching phone call home at the center of the movie's last act, in which she reveals Bett's depths and sets up the film's denoument. One of my top-10 crime films, it's cast perfectly from top to bottom, but even in such company Black stands out.

And think of the many films in which she also stood out among casts of underperforming bigger stars, or in lackadaisical material: Portnoy's Complaint, Capricorn One (again with Dern), Hitchock's Family Plot, even in Nashville, where her country singer seems far more real than, say, Ronee Blakely's, and Blakely was a singer. She also tries hard but cannot save Altman's post-Nashville Come Back To The Five And Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Some of the obits referred to her in her later career as a 'scream queen', but she barely fits the modern definition, of B movie actresses who exist to be victimised while nearly naked. She might be typed in a tradition of What Happened To Baby Jane, or perhaps like Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele, stronger actresses who relished off-beat roles. In that I was reminded of Karen Steele, a 50s actress who came into films as a statuesque beauty queen, but often projected too much strength and intelligence to be cast comfortably in big pictures. Watch her in Ride Lonesome, and think what Karen Black could have done with a similar role. It's too glib to say she might have succeeded in an early era in Hollywood, in Bette Davis parts (that Bett in The Outfit isn't totally coincidental), but she was lucky in a sense to enter the business at a point where there were roles for her, and unlucky that the business changed so rapidly just when she should have been being offered roles playing women who were more in control. Roles outside horror films. Karen Black was a great actress, who should have been a star, and her death, by reminding us of so many 'how it was' and 'what might have beens' is made even sadder.

SPEAKING OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I've just seen the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby, and while it's wrong to judge a book by its cover or a film by its trailer, this is movie May at IT, and I have to say my immediate reaction was: I can wait. You can link to the trailer here.

It's one of the greatest of all American novels, and some of the things that make it great are precisely those that mitigate against its being turned into a great movie; films inevitably reduce it to a love story, an excuse for glorious sets and costumes, and a celebration of Roaring Twenties excess, rather than Fitzgerald's layered and nuanced analysis of class, success, and the American Dream (contained in a love story and a celebration of glorious sets, costumes and excess).

But watching the trailer, and going back only as far as the last Great Gatsby film, Robert Redford > Leonardo DiCaprio, Sam Waterston > Toby Maguire, and although Mia Farrow probably is not > Carey Mulligan, Mulligan seems to have been cast more as Mia than Daisy. But who's going to match Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Scott Wilson, Lois Chiles, or Roberts Blossom, each perfectly cast in that 1974 film?

 Robert Evans had bought the rights (it had last been filmed in 1949, with Alan Ladd, who was the DiCaprio of his era. I haven't seen the 2000 TV movie with Toby Stephens and Mia Sorvino, and frankly, I have no plans to) so his girlfriend Ali MacGraw could play Daisy--and she would have been more interesting. But after she ditched Evans for Steve McQueen, various actresses were considered, including Chiles, who wound up playing Jordan Baker. Candice Bergen might have been better, or Katharine Ross; Cybil Shepherd would have been interesting because she might have captured some of the Zelda southern belle.

Jack Clayton's film was criticised in 1974 for being too glossy and for spawning a whole retro style fashion campaign--but in retrospect it holds up pretty well; Redford's reserve being perhaps its biggest flaw. He seems to be trying to capture a Gatsby struggling to be what he isn't because he thinks he has to in order to win Daisy, which is part of it. But Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay is truer to Fitzgerald than anyone thought, right down to the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, who's no longer with us, watching everything in Nick Carraway's Valley of Ashes anyway.

And perhaps Redford's seeming if anything too mature and worldly for the role might contrast well with DiCaprio's rarely seeming mature enough, as he also failed to convince in Revolutionary Road, The Aviator, or J Edgar. And if you doubt the Alan Ladd comparison, here' a shot of Ladd as Gatsby to ponder, along with Leonardo. Eerie, isn't it?