Dallas Buyers Club is nominated for Oscars for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay. It is rated 94 on the Tomatometer. I heard it was about gay rights. With the Oscars coming up, with Russia bashing gays, and with Uganda’s president Museveni signing the anti-gay bill into law in his country a couple of days ago, we thought it was about time to go and see Dallas Buyers Club.
And what a powerful movie it is!
The movie is based on the true story of Ron Woodroof, a Texas cowboy born in 1950, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Ron (Matthew McConaughey) was an electrician and a rodeo cowboy in Dallas. He was as free-wheeling as they get. The opening scene showed him doing two sluts at once under the bleachers during a rodeo performance. His days were seemingly spent with his brains fried with cocaine and alcohol, while he was trying to make a living as a working man, and hanging out with his working man’s buddies in white-trash Texas bars. When he had a minor accident at work where an explosion knocked him out, he was delivered to the hospital. His blood tests showed an utterly unforgiving surprise. HIV-positive, with a prognosis of 30 days left to live.
Ron’s world in 1986 did not allow room for a disease that is associated with “fags” — to use the mildest word of all that he used. His friends immediately ostracized him, and he found himself deathly sick, lonely and frightened. The cowboy in him awakened and as the last few days of his life started ticking away, he decided to take the bull by the horn, to use a rodeo term. He met, and initially shunned, Rayon (Jared Leto), a flaming homosexual who took a liking to him at the hospital. Rayon was offensive to everything Ron knew and believed in, and yet, against all odds, the two became friends and supporters of each other.
During the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., the medical establishment didn’t have a consistent approach to the fight against the virus. Misinformation abounded, and the FDA appeared to be blocking progress, while the streets were full of people who were obviously dying. When you face imminent and certain death, months away, or weeks, or days, nothing will stop you from trying a medicine, whether it’s known to work or not, and regardless of whether it’s considered dangerous. Ron Woodroof put together a group of outcasts and renegades in search of a solution.
He founded the Dallas Buyers Club. He didn’t sell medicines. He sold club memberships at $400 a month, and with the membership came an education program about nutrition, lifestyle, vitamins and, yes, drugs. The club became hugely successful, and eventually attracted law enforcement, the IRS and of course the FDA with all guns blazing.
Matthew McConaughey lost 30 pounds for this role. He played Ron so convincingly, I didn’t see the actor, I only saw the person, with all his fire and fury. Jared Leto played Rayon so powerfully, he won me over just like Rayon won Ron over. Rayon was a drag-wearing, drug addicted, flaming homosexual, covered with sores, which were again covered with make-up. In other words, someone most of us never have any contact with. Yet, as the story progressed, I saw more and more into the person that Rayon was and started caring for him. Rayon opened the gates for me to see all the other lost souls, desperate for a cure, desperate for another chance at life.
I would not be surprised if both, McConaughey and Leto won awards for their performances in Dallas Buyers Club.
Rating: ****