An uncomfortable trip down Memory Lane

Rating: 8/10 (11 February 2014)

Matthew McConaughey's performance is the powerhouse at the centre of this movie. The script distorts the historical facts in small but significant ways to give the story momentum and to point up the desperation of the situation HIV patients were in back in those dark days when the only licensed medication was AZT, which was more killer than cure. Ron Woodruff (who was almost certainly bisexual) is here rampantly straight and stridently homophobic until his diagnosis forces him into the company of all those gay men who were the principal victims of Aids in its early days. Rayon, the drag queen who joins Ron in his life-saving enterprise and then becomes his buddy, is a fictitious character but a gift of a part which Jared Leto sinks his teeth into with the kind of relish William Hurt brought to KISS OF THE SPIDER-WOMAN (1985). Jennifer Garner gives a nicely understated performance as the overworked doctor who is not supposed to be sympathetic to Ron's efforts to circumvent the FDA.
For those of us who lost many good friends and colleagues back in that terrible first decade of the Plague Years, this is an uncomfortable trip down Memory Lane. The final scene is ludicrously over-the-top but perhaps forgivable as an attempt to end this morbid movie on a brief high.
DALLAS BUYERS CLUB succeeds at every level, entertaining us with the sheer pace of its story, overwhelming us with the mesmerising acting by Matthew McConaughey (who deserves all the awards that are coming his way) and vividly reminding us of the fatal ineptness with which successive administrations and the pharmaceutical companies responded to the challenge of HIV/Aids.