Review #701: 'Dallas Buyers Club' (2013)

It's hard to imagine a time when the words 'starring Matthew McConaughey' spelled bad news. Two years of wise choices, good films and career-redefining performances have turned the actor into one of the hottest actors around. Killer Joe (2011) and Mud (2012) showed his ability to play dangerous, mysterious and unpleasant characters while maintained that Texas charm and charisma. It seems like they were not much more than a warm up for Dallas Buyers Club, where he plays the skeletal Ron Woodroof, a boozy, cocaine-addled, womanising redneck electrician and part-time rodeo rider, who finds out that he has AIDS and just 30 days to live.

Initially, he reacts angrily, threatening the doctors (Denis O'Hare and Jennifer Garner) after they ask him if he has engaged in homosexual activity. With the knowledge of his impending death, Ron studies the disease. He cannot wait for trial testing of an experimental drug named AZT, and so pays a Mexican janitor to smuggle it out of the hospital for him. When he travels to Mexico for more AZT, Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne), an American doctor who has had his license revoked, informs Ron that the AZT is killing him. He instead prescribes him drugs unapproved in the US, and soon enough, Ron's health has improved and he has lived way beyond his initial 30 days. With the drugs unavailable in his home country, Ron smuggles them across the border, setting up a buyers club for AIDS patients that soon becomes extremely popular for its terrified patients.

McConaughey's performance isn't the only one that impresses. Jared Leto, near unrecognisable as transvestite Rayon, injects a remarkable subtlety into his performance. Rayon didn't exist in the real-life story, and would normally come across as the token larger-than-life character that the Oscars seem to love so dearly. Yet the delicate tragedy of Rayon's heroin-addicted character combined with Leto's performance, is the foundation for Ron's fresh outlook. There's no moment of realisation where Ron has a U-turn on his homophobia, but his reluctant friendship with Rayon - and Rayon's ability to bring in the gay market on the buyers club - speaks louder that a close-up with sentimental music.

Jennifer Garner's Eve is also a fictional addition, and her role is one of the main negative aspects of the film. Not that she's bad, it's just that her character is overwhelmingly unbelievable. The film includes her to add a pointless romantic angle to the story, bowing to the familiar characteristics of the biopic. But Dallas Buyers Club doesn't try to tug on your heart-strings by blaring out a score or making it's protagonist reverse his personality. Ron starts out as a mumbling, racist redneck and ends a mumbling, racist redneck. But the energy he put into living hard, having threesomes with whores in coke-fuelled trailer parties is soon channelled into something positive, and his personality and sheer stubbornness manages to achieve things that most people could not. And that is a more powerful sentiment than telling us that life is like a box of chocolates.


Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Denis O'Hare
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie