I prefer to die with my boots on

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2015)

A conventional biographical drama, Jean-Marc Vallee's "Dallas Buyers Club" stars Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof, a heterosexual but homophobic man living in 1980s America. When he is diagnosed with AIDS, a disease then stigmatised as being a "gay illness", Ron is subjected to the very abuses he once hurled toward homosexuals.
"Dallas Buyers Club's" second act watches as Ron struggles to get his hands on pharmaceutical drugs which may help his condition. As the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned such drugs, Ron procures them through illegal channels. Eventually he begins smuggling unapproved drugs to other patients with AIDS. In doing so, he prolongs the lives of many.
"Dallas Buyers Club" is primarily interested in mapping Ron's transition from prejudice to tolerance. Like the original "Planet of the Apes" franchise, which gave chauvinistic white racists a taste of their own medicine, "Club" takes a homophobic and possibly racist rodeo cowboy – your quintessential Reaganite – and pushes him toward "compassion". In this regard, Ron strikes up a relationship with a transsexual called Rayon (Jared Leto). Though well-meaning, Rayon's character simply exists as a disposable plaything to foster the growth of heteronormatives. He's the fatally doomed queer character who's sacrificed so that the straight, white protagonist can find a sense of purpose (the film doesn't understand that transsexuals aren't the same as cisgender gays).
And so via Rayon, Ron shifts from skirt-chasing bigot to compassionate crusader. To make this shift he must first become anarcho-capitalist extraordinaire, a shift which epitomises the film's unabashedly American values; work hard, start a business, earn a cool million and you too can be an Oskar Schindler. HIV can't stop the American Dream.
Obvious, cloying, and mistaking excess for "good acting", "Dallas Buyer's Club" is at its best when it's demonstrating the sickening levels of hatred homosexuals habitually deal with. It also hints upon the xenophobically inhumane calculations of the decade's public health system, in which racial and sexual differences became synonymous with abnormalities and illness. The film also captures well the various modes of self-care that individuals infected with AIDS sought out in the early days of the pandemic, a time when treatments were expensive or non-existent. During this period "buyers clubs" - underground economies that proved to be more reliable than the exclusive corridors of government-funded clinical trials – became a necessary alternative for surviving AIDS. Though deemed "illegal", they'd become a symbol for progressive social movements, movements which flew in the face of the FDA and Big Pharma. The film co-stars an out-of-her-depth Jennifer Garner.
7/10 – Worth one viewing. See "The Children's Hour", "Puncture" (2011) and "How To Survive a Plague".