Dallas Buyers Club: finding priests in the desperate – Review by Craig Nash

Written by: Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack; Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallee

Dallas Buyers Club is a story of desperation and the lengths desperate people go to find salvation in whatever ways it can be found.  And not “salvation” in the ethereal sense used in evangelical circles, but in the dirt and grime of everyday existence. Ultimately, for the believer, the film offers a picture of the priestly duties we all have to each other, dispensing fragments of grace from storehouses beyond ourselves to those we live with and bump up against along our journey.

Based on a true story, Ron Woodruff (played by Matthew McConaughey) a hard-living, womanizing electrician who passes his time in the “man’s man” sport of rodeo, discovers he has the deadly and supposedly non (in the 1980’s at least) “man’s man” disease of AIDS.  The film follows Woodruff as he struggles to find effective medication through the quagmire created by the FDA.  Along the way he discovers allies in unexpected and uncomfortable places and people: in Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), a sympathetic doctor desperate to find a cure for her HIV/AIDS patients, in a transgender woman named Rayon (played brilliantly by Jared Leto), in the LGBT community that Rayon shares with Woodruff, and in the medical communities of other countries whose regulatory arms are bit as restrictive as those in the U.S.

As you might expect (and can learn from the trailers,) the film chronicles Woodruff’s transformation from a homophobic Texas “bad boy” to a more understanding and empathetic character.  In the process, though, he never loses his edge.  In fact, he sharpens it on his quest to survive.  And he realizes quickly that his quest for survival is intricately tied up with other people’s quest for survival from the disease.

Examples pervade the film: desperate people reaching into whatever reserves they can locate to save not just themselves, but others:

• Woodruff prays, in what first appears to be a church but is revealed to be a strip club once the camera pans out, for God to help him.  He looks up (beyond a stripper) and discovers someone who can help him.
• Rayon, a patient under the care of Dr. Saks and a participant in a new pharmaceutical trial, reveals that she is sharing her dosage of AZT with others suffering from the disease. (A fact that, ironically, probably extended her life.)
• Woodruff, at the U.S./Mexican border, smuggling in a trunk full of unapproved medication, dressed as a priest.
• An elderly gay couple donating a house to the cause of saving the Dallas “Buyers Club,” the business set up by Woodruff in an effort to bypass FDA regulations.

I grew up in a tradition that was, at the very least, suspicious of Catholicism.  Veneration of Mary was a problem.  The candles and large families raised our eyebrows as well.  But nothing offended our Protestant sensibilities more than the perceived necessity of a priest to be the means by which we receive forgiveness and grace.  So to bolster our case, we clung tightly to the doctrine of “the priesthood of the believer.”  We don’t need a priest to receive the blessings of God, we claimed: we have the Holy Spirit living inside us!

The problem with this is that there is really no such thing as “the priesthood of the believer.”   The proper Reformation idea concerning priests isn’t that everyone is a vessel of grace for himself or herself, but that everyone in the church is a vessel of grace for each other.  I am your priest, and you are mine.

This is how God comes to us.  This is how we are saved: by and through each other.  There’s an old saying in certain evangelical circles that says, “evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”  I suppose that is true.  “Dallas Buyers Club” speaks to a similar truth and could give birth to another aphorism: grace is simply one AIDS patient helping another AIDS patient live just a little more fully, for just a few minutes longer.

Craig Nash is the Community Pastor for Formation and Small Groups at University Baptist Church in Waco, TX.  He often spends his days off in movie theaters, smoky bars, and walking his dog Jane through the park.