Of Powerful Performance, Of Stirring Emotions, Of Just Causes, Of Sensitive Messages

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2014)

Reviewed by: Dare Devil Kid (DDK) Rating: 4.2/5 stars
July, 1985. While taking bets on a fellow bull rider at the rodeo Ron Woodroof (McConaughey) glances at the day's newspaper. The headline notes that actor Rock Hudson has admitted to having the AIDS virus. Muttering some profanities, Woodroof goes on about his business. Sadly, he'll soon learn that AIDS is also his business.
Featuring two bravura performances, "Dallas Buyers Club" is a hard hitting drama that looks at the world in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. An accident at work causes Ron to go to the hospital, where his blood is tested. When Ron learns that he is HIV positive he goes into denial, claiming to anyone that will listen that he's not gay. The news worsens when his diagnosis shows that his illness had escalated into full-blown AIDS and he is given a mere 30 days to live. With time running out, Ron does some quick research and learns about the experimental drug AZT. When the hospital refuses to grant him access to AZT, which was still in trials at that point, he reacts angrily. "Screw the FDA," he says, "I'm going to be DOA!" He finds a contact at a local hospital that steals the drug for him in exchange for money but soon that avenue closes. Later, Ron learns that the drug is readily available in Mexico from an unlicensed MD - played perfectly by a nearly unrecognizable Griffin Dunne – who informs him that the highly toxic levels in AZT has nearly left him dead. With his own prescriptions of alternative medicines he nurses Ron back and gives him a fighting chance against AIDS. Realizing how effective the non-FDA-approved drugs are, Woodroof begins importing them for his own use, but also to "give away" to those who need it – provided they can afford the hefty monthly fee necessary to belong to his "club". This is where the seeds for the "Dallas Buyers Club" – an establishment that challenges the unfair and inconsiderate system – are sown. The great conflicts set up here are Woodroof's efforts to fool the Border Patrol, the FDA, the DEA, and the doctors who put regulations before the slim hopes of desperate, dying patients.
Woodroof, who is initially presented as an entirely unlikable bigot, partners with Rayon (Jared Leto), a flamboyant transgender he meets at an early hospital stay. Rayon's task is to recruit club members, while Woodroof works to outsmart the FDA. A great touch — the way this friendship of convenience builds. McConaughey delivers the brazen, foul- mouthed laughs and Leto tugs at your heartstrings. Their relationship is the true heart of the film, just as McConaughey and Leto's performances are its strength. Each actor was called upon to become frighteningly emaciated in order to play these men who clung to life with pure tenacity.
In the past couple of years Matthew McConaughey has transformed himself from the smiling guy with the Texas-twang in countless romantic comedies to an actor to be reckoned with. Dropping almost 40 pounds of weight for the role, his sunken eyed character bears no resemblance to the smiling, handsome star many fans are familiar with. In fact, if you didn't know that McConaughey was playing Ron Woodroof, you might be hard pressed to identify him in the film. But it's not just the physical changes that make this performance so good. A definite homophobe, Ron soon finds himself the subject of jokes and innuendos by his former friends when his condition is learned. Ron learns the new rules life is teaching him. McConaughey portrays the real-life Woodroof on screen as a complex combination of sharp edges and unbridled gusto. He has an improbable vitality that emerges from some unfathomable wellspring of strength. The man should have been dead, but instead outlived his 30-day sentence by seven years. Enough time to build a mini-empire and become a soldier against a broken system.
An utterly unrecognizable Jared Leto plays a cross-dressing gay AIDS patient who sees Woodroof's traveling/smuggling pharmacy as a lifeline, and ignores Ron's homophobia long enough for them to team up and steal an idea that's worked elsewhere. Leto is entirely transformed. His inflections, demeanor, movements, mannerisms, and expressions are all aligned in service of his radical transfiguration. That outer work pales in comparison with the stunning vulnerability of his performance, though.
Dallas Buyers Club, which is notable for the actors' physical alterations, is ultimately about the transformation of a man from a homophobic wastrel into the leader of a grassroots campaign for survival — both his own, and those he once reviled. The based-on-true-events story follows McConaughey as Ron Woodroof - a gambling, womanizing, homophobic, self-proclaimed one-man rodeo drunkard who becomes an unlikely anti-establishment hero. He emerges as the leader of a fight to get non-FDA-approved drugs and supplements to AIDS patients during the volatile early days of the epidemic.
Ron Woodroof's story has a universal appeal in that it examines the way in which our greatest challenges call upon us to be more than we could ever imagined to. In the film, Woodroof says, "I've only got one life; I want it to mean something." His illness assured that it did. When we are broken there is an opportunity for us to reform and allow our better selves to emerge. That's just what this rodeo-loving, whore-mongering, whiskey-drinking, son-of-a gun did; and in the movie version of his life, he does so in a highly entertaining way to behold.
The films is a pro-active, uplifting and thoroughly entertaining jaunt through AIDS history, and the epic commitment of its actors to do right by it. "Dallas Buyers Club" is not only one of the best movies of the year, it's easily one of the best movies of all time.