A deeply empathetic movie about the messy early responses to the AIDS crisis

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 2014)

At the start of the AIDS crisis people knew little about the disease except that it was a virtual death sentence and that it seemed to be selectively affecting homosexuals and drug users. Doctors didn't know how to treat it, governments were slow to react, and large parts of society reacted by blaming the victims, and shunning them, instead of showing empathy. "Dallas Buyers Club" is a movie about empathy, set at this uncertain, pivotal moment in American history. Most movies are exercises in empathy, even when they don't mean to be, because they ask us to view stories from perspectives other than our own; this is one of the great strengths of the cinematic art form and one of the best proofs of its value. In "Dallas Buyers Club" the main character, a homophobic coke-head electrician and bullrider who lives in a trailer park (Matthew McConaughey), is the person we accompany through the early part of the AIDS saga. It is hard to imagine anyone coming to the end of the movie without respecting him, feeling for him, and liking him, even though few of the people who seek out a movie about the AIDS crisis are likely to be in sympathy with the hateful slurs or the self-destructive lifestyle that define him at the story's beginning. The movie is about his own journey toward empathy as well, and it is fascinating to notice how his unique perspective colors that journey and defines its limits.
One of the most remarkable consequences of the early AIDS era, and a recurring theme in the memoirs and narratives that have come out of that experience, was that many HIV-positive individuals took it upon themselves to become self-taught experts on the medicinal, scientific, financial, and legal issues surrounding their diagnosis. When hospitals and the FDA and the general public seemed helpless at best and apathetic at worse, communities emerged among those most affected that provided conduits for information and support, and in some cases used other-than- legal means to give desperate members access to untested, unapproved treatments. In this film, the titular Dallas Buyers Club is one such community. Its singleminded, brash, charismatic, lying, stealing, drinking, politically-incorrect leader is the Robin Hood of a ragtag band of individuals whose perspectives he does not share and cannot quite understand, but to whom he is intimately tied by a shared medical fate. The other person we, and he, know best is a transgendered and usually-stoned free spirit from the club scene named Rayon (Jared Leto), but there are glimpses of people from other walks of life as well, from the young and broke to an older, white collar couple in a committed relationship. The perspectives of medical professionals runs a similar gamut, from an unlicensed homeopathic type south of the border to a tool of Big Pharma to a concerned but cautious doctor played by Jennifer Garner. What is sobering is the realization that although all of these people want a cure, they come to the table with such different backgrounds and ideals that fighting each other is easier than fighting AIDS. McConaughey's character, on the phone with a doctor, pleads, "I see where you're coming from, can you see where I'm coming from?" "Dallas Buyers Club" is a movie about seeing where people are coming from, and a damn good one.