Jean-Marc Vallée made intimate dramas that let difficult people stay difficult. We value his handling of actors and his restless editing, though Dallas Buyers Club shows how sympathy for a protagonist can narrow a film’s view.
Fi1m perspective
In Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Ron Woodroof responds to vulnerability by becoming more difficult to deal with. Vallée gives Matthew McConaughey room to be abrasive without treating every confrontation as proof of the man's decency. We were moved by the performance because his need for help never makes him conveniently agreeable. Vallée is good at this: allowing us to care about someone without insisting that we approve of him.
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) was the breakthrough, and The Young Victoria (2009) took him into international period drama. Wider recognition followed with Dallas Buyers Club and Wild (2014), the latter starring Reese Witherspoon. He then moved into television with Big Little Lies (2017) and Sharp Objects (2018). Across his work, brief, silent flashes of memory let us see what was going on in a character's head without waiting for dialogue to explain it.
He favoured handheld shooting and natural light, with few fixed marks or rehearsals for actors. Cinematographer Yves Bélanger was a recurring collaborator, and Vallée often shot rehearsals, leaving room for something unplanned to happen. Music often belonged to the characters' surroundings rather than arriving as an added score. In Dallas Buyers Club, it leaves the actors to establish the mood, a sensible choice when so much of the humour comes from their friction.
Vallée also edited Dallas Buyers Club with Martin Pensa, keeping its confrontations moving rather than stopping to announce a lesson. That pace makes room for humour without making Woodroof's predicament seem trivial. We recommend the film with a reservation that matters: its account of the questions surrounding treatment is less thorough than its attention to Woodroof. The performances make that limitation easier to forgive, but they do not remove it. Begin there, and leave time afterwards to argue about what it leaves out.
Biography
Jean-Marc Vallée was a Canadian director, editor and screenwriter. He studied film at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His early short films include Stéréotypes (1991), Les fleurs magiques (1995) and Les mots magiques (1998). His debut feature Black List (1995) received nine Genie Award nominations, including for direction and editing.
Vallée's subsequent features include C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), The Young Victoria (2009), Café de Flore (2011), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), which he also edited, Wild (2014) and Demolition (2016). He directed the HBO series Big Little Lies (2017) and the miniseries Sharp Objects (2018).
Vallée was born on 9 March 1963 in Montréal, Québec, and died on 25 December 2021.
