Review of Dallas Buyers Club (2013) by Eric F — 25 Jul 2017

A compelling and at times heartbreaking biopic based on events relating to the AIDS epidemic during the '80s, "Dallas Buyers Club" packs a mean punch, but does so with compassion, heart, and lots of soul.

In this film, Mathew McConaughey delivers probably the best performance he's ever done as real life AIDS patient, Ron Woodroof, an electrician who also works on the side at a rodeo.

After nearly being electrocuted to death, Woodroof wakes up in the hospital to two doctors informing him that he has HIV and is likely to die in about one month's time. Woodroof, being the ignorant bigot that he apparently is, doesn't heed the doctors' warnings of settling his affairs and instead believes they made a huge mistake (claiming he couldn't possibly have HIV, since he's "not a faggot"). Upon realizing that the doctors' story is more than plausible he searches for ways to cure his illness and eventually comes across the drug, AZT (which is still in it's trial stages and showing signs of ineffectiveness and toxicity) and finds ways to buy the drug off an inside source -- one that quickly dries up. After he winds up in the hospital a second time, Woodroof meets Rayon, a trans woman who is also suffering from the effects of HIV and (by association) AIDS -- who soon becomes his business partner in a clever scheme that involves smuggling unapproved pharmaceutical drugs and vitamins from out of the country and selling buyers club "memberships" to people for access to the drugs.

Besides McConaughey's brilliant performance, Jennifer Garner is as fantastic as ever here, and actor Jared Leto makes an award-winning turn as Rayon -- a casting decision that stands as evidence of Hollywood's continued unwillingness to cast actual transgender and gender-variant actors in transgender roles, but is nonetheless among one of the greatest performances of 2013.

Jean-Marc Vallee's "Dallas Buyers Club" is a resonant drama that spent a long time in movie limbo, but it was well worth the wait. It's a film about survival, finding friendship in the people you'd least expect it from, and makes a fairly solid argument against the FDA's long history of approving pharmaceuticals that will make them a higher profit over the potentially more effective drugs off of which they stand to make less.