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Movie Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Gregory Fichter

Dallas Buyers Club comes as a victory lap in the complete career redefinition of Matthew McConaughey, rounding two years of engaged, unexpected roles in mainly independent films. His fallow period in comedies blandly paired with Kate Hudson or Jennifer Lopez proved too much for the man and the native Texan found his way into a series of southern blue-collar films (Killer Joe, Mud, The Paperboy) that reshaped the marginalized, mocked “Sexiest Man Alive” into a better character actor in kinky, violent, and tragic roles – an artistic rebirth culminating in his pounds-shedding, Oscar-sniffing role as true life homophobic, redneck AIDS patient and drug smuggler Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club.

A life of promiscuous, coke-fuelled partying with rodeo groupies leads to an HIV diagnosis for the gaunt, reckless Woodroof. Mistrustful of doctors and shunned by his pals as an obvious “fag” – because in 1985 the AIDS virus was still “the gay flu” and an ignorant justification for institutional homophobia – Woodroof sets up a scheme to transport and distribute experimental, FDA-unapproved drugs and treatments. If there is a villain in Dallas Buyers Club it is the inaction and bureaucracy of the FDA and its regulations against unapproved drugs which have shown positive results in sufferers over the experimentally-approved (possibly detrimental) pharmaceutical AZT. Less about the problem of AIDS as a social catastrophe and more about the topical issue of governmental drug and health care involvement, Dallas Buyers Club turns out to be much more rousing as a “catch me if you can” adventure than as another solemn picture concerning a man dying before our eyes (though it is impossible not to be moved by McConaughey’s despondency in a few key moments).

Bookending McConaughey’s impassioned, primal performance is Jared Leto in full drag representing the outcasted gay population as Rayon – a smack-addict transvestite AZT patient acting as Woodroof’s partner-in-crime to sell the contraband (and in an overly-tidy revelation that is conveyed with one small smile at a gay bar, change the way Woodroof feels about homosexuals). Rayon is undoubtedly the film’s symbolically tragic figure – a diva-boy plunging his veins with dope while giving homilies on tolerance and bringing a Marc Bolan-obsessed quality of glamour and stoic humor to a film that shows a debt to the medium-shot unsteady look of great 1970s dramas.

Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto
in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Dallas Buyers Club only feels heavy-handed when a doctor (Jennifer Garner); sceptic of the effects of AZT and the willing blindness of greedy pill-profiting, befriends Rayon and Woodroof and bucks against her superiors. Dr. Eve is an exposition character dumbing us down with “this is wrong’s” that belong in a TV movie; writers must stop spoon-feeding us a film’s moral stance and historical hindsights when they are already plainly evident. It gets worse when she goes to dinner with Woodroof and they banter with a hint of forced romance to placate the broadest spectrum of viewers, covering already-tread ground and slowing the film’s urgent pacing reflective of Ron’s race against time (he is initially diagnosed with 30 days to live).

Ron Woodroof lived many years longer than that first desperate month; his ensuing years as a pharmaceutical outlaw are a stranger-than-fiction story that is not about waiting for the inevitability of death (which happens offscreen for both he and Rayon) but rather in bucking against the moral wrongs of the world. The movie ends with a freeze-frame of Ron riding a bronco to nail home the point that perseverance has resulted in a statuesque immortality solidified by Matthew McConaughey’s stunning performance in Dallas Buyers Club.

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Gregory Fichter

Greg toiled for years in the hallowed bowels of the legendary Thomas Video and has studied cinema as part of the Concentration for Film Studies and Aesthetics at Oakland University. He has hosted the cult movie night "Celluloid Sundays" at The Belmont in Hamtramck, MI. and enjoys everything from High Trash to Low Art.

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