Doctors said he had only thirty days to live, but what do they know?

Rating: 10/10 (31 December 2016)

2013 had its share of real-life stories from the over-flashy and needlessly indigestible "American Hustle" to Scorsese's very-entertaining-but-no-"Goodfellas" "Wolf of Wall Street" and the respectable but polarizing "12 Years: A Slave". Here you have one biopic that could have easily fallen in the trap of sentimentalism or blind militancy but didn't, because the director Jean-Marc Vallee knew this was the sort of story to make half the film and needs nothing but honest storytelling, straightforward directing and great acting.
"Dallas Buyers Club" tells the story of Ron Woodroof, a rodeo player, sleazy, coke and sex-addict and homophobic redneck, not a nice guy at all. Karma will play a dirty trick when a doctor diagnoses him with the HIV virus and doesn't give him more than thirty days to live, but Ron will not only contradict the prognostic but will live long enough to fight the pharmaceutical industry and provide AIDS-patients the medicine they really need. It's a long crusade against the major companies who test the effect of a drug named AZT, supposed to cure some cancer-like AIDS effects. Ron, who bribes a hospital worker to get AZT, discovers that the medicine only makes people survive for a short amount of time while the right doses of very specific drugs (vitamins and peptides) can make them live. The drugs are available in Mexico and other countries but they're still frowned upon in the United States. That's the situation.
This is not just a fight for health, but for the freedom to chose the way you want to cure yourself. Ron doesn't see himself as a crusader, he's just a man who acts and moves forward, he doesn't give a damn about what doctors said, he's practical, if a cocktail of drugs made him live long enough to survive the prognostic, he must blow the whistle and make the other patients know, the rest is only judicial matters and he can handle it. So, he opens his own business and sells drugs he manages to smuggle in exchange of a 400-dollar membership in the "Dallas Buyers Club". As time moves on, the membership implodes and proves the efficiency of the new treatment, to the point that his first treating physician, played by Jennifer Garner, questions the ethics of the pharmaceutical lobbies' methods.
What makes "Dallas Buyers Club" such a great story is that it never ceases to stop delivering information, it is a real enlightenment about the first years of AIDS and how it started to spread and be only perceived as a gay or junky disease, and what better way to show it from the perspective of a man who starts as homophobic. There's something of a poetic irony that Ron suffers the same rejection and, no pun intended, gets a taste of his own medicine. What we witness in the first and second act is a brilliant metamorphosis of an individual from a sleazy macho man act to a human being who over steps the bounds of discrimination and understands that the same way, viruses don't make differences, no person should. He changes and for the better. That's the stuff great stories are made of. It's not just about health but about dignity.
And even with such a premise, "Dallas Buyers Club" could have been a cheap emotional underdog story, but you never really see the transition because all through the film, this is Ron acting as a militant, smuggling, phoning, bribing, lying, disguising himself, confronting the doctors, the cops, the FDA, only near the end, you can see the metamorphosis. And the key to Ron's transformation is the character of Rayon, a young transsexual who's rejected at first, but eventually inspires Ron one of his first powerful reactions to homophobia. Any other film would've made It too preachy and obvious but here, it works because it's just plays it straightforwardly, without any hint of a possible agenda. It is about people.
And Matthew McConaughey delivers the performance of a lifetime as a man who wouldn't take crap from anybody because he's moved by the most basic human instincts: rage and survival. When he learns about the news, Ron goes through the five emotional stages of grief, he's in denial first, but then gets angry because he understand he screwed his life by having unprotected sex, he's scared and started with bargain, but then he's not resigned in the sense that he accepts his death, he's enraged because he knows people can at least live with the cure but aren't given the proper medication. Ron wants to live, he wants his friends to survive too, so nothing can stand between this thirst for living and his struggle, only AIDS can defeat him and he knows any month earned is a victory, and there's no defeat because it is not a fight to be ever over.
Watching "Dallars Buyers Club", I couldn't help but feel deeply attached to the protagonists, their sadness and anger, and I was shocked to see industrial big shots depriving people from their basic freedom. I don't expect everything to be 100% accurate but I want to believe it because I know humanity can be that cruel and cynical, and sometimes, the sleaziest persons can reveal themselves in such extreme situation. As sad as AIDS was for Ron, it made him a better man than he could ever lived had he not been HIV positive. It was a destiny and a magnificent one.
"Dallas Buyers Club" is a powerful drama, served by spectacular performances and a great reminder of the suffering caused by AIDS on a psychological level, it even hit a personal chord because I had my share of worries and I will never forget how tasty the air felt when I was told that my test was negative.