Stunt Acting

Rating: 5/10 (12 October 2013)

This is an example of a movie with over-the-top Stunt Acting, where both Matthew and Jared have taken the idea of weight loss as a character trait and turned it into a justification for an Oscar nod. Although Jared does do an admirable job at keeping himself slim and in character for the role of the Tranny Rayon, Matt just can't help himself and slides right down into his old reliable "good-ol' Texas boy" character, and does nothing to change from the dozen other times he has played the same role.
It is also disconcerting to see that the issue of treatments for AIDS becomes secondary in the tale, because this is deemed "entertainment with a cause." Whereas the story should be concentrated on the effort to find even a ray of hope in AIDS treatment, we instead get sidetracked into Ron Woodroff's egotistic cry for attention, and baldfaced greed when he starts his "Buyer's Club" which is really just a way to get rich quick.
In terms of Ron's homophobic attitudes, there is nothing in the film's execution or in Matthew's acting which leads us to believe that he has acquired a new perspective, and in fact, it plays out that he is just about as annoying at the end as he was at the beginning.
Overall, it would have been more enjoyable if the director was not so concerned about making sure that Ron was portrayed as a womanizer, since the excessive number of scenes that revolve around hetero-sexism tends to overshadow any hope of ever really giving AIDS patients a chance to present themselves as anything more than mere cardboard cutouts-- every other person who occupies Ron's world is background to him and his enormous, over-bearing, bloated ego. And unfortunately, I think that maybe it's not Ron's ego at all, it really is Matthew McConaughey's ego that blocks out any other character who threatens to turn up in his own private Idaho.