Review of Dallas Buyers Club (2013) by Matthew C — 18 May 2014

We can talk all day about Vallee's great collaboration with his actors to bring a stain of history to life. No one should be arguing that the actors didn't give it their all. It takes a special kind of actor, Jared Leto, to play such a broken man.

This is the first accomplishment that the film achieves. The people in this story are real. They have dreams, fears, hopes, and loves. They want to live and be happy. Same as you and me. Yet dysfunctional upbringing, distant parents, bullying, confusion and a fallen human nature combine to dash the sweet aromas and visions that many have in and for their lives.

With enough tragedy and misdirection, we all would curl up and give up. Ron (McConaughey) is a man without purpose. He smokes, drinks, hooks up with any woman he sees and doesn't care about anything save his own skin and pleasure.

Aids changes that. But more than this, people change that. People who share his suffering, who share his primal desire to thwart death. He becomes a champion of these people. This movie is more than HIV, big drug business, and hospital procedures.

With elements from Patch Adams and Philadelphia, Buyer's Club is about human suffering and what it means to suffer. What does it mean if you're dying? What defines your life if death is so close? The film reminded me that people are miserable all over the world and their misery becomes them.

They do everything to drown out that despair but without God and God-like virtue, misery cannot be relieved. Despite language and inexcusable content, Buyers Club speaks plainly that we cannot forget each other and what we're made for.