RELEASED outside the awards season, Dallas Buyers Club might have slipped through the net as just another lowbudget indie picture. Coming out surrounded by the hoopla and publicity that comes with the Oscars and other awards, the film gets all the attention it deserves.
The pundits have even put Matthew McConaughey ahead in the best actor Oscar race. The talking point may be the amount of weight he shed – some 40lbs – to play HIVpositive Texan electrician Ron Woodroof, but there’s more than weight loss to his performance as a man who refused to accept that he had 30 days to live.
This is the mid-1980s when HIV was wrongly labelled a gay disease by many and the drugs didn’t exist to, if not cure then, at least, prolong life. Woodroof, first seen having sex with two women in the bull stall at a rodeo ring, ends up in hospital after being electrocuted and doctors tell him tests show he has the HIV virus.
He refuses to accept the death sentence, travelling to Mexico to source non-approved medicine from a doctor (Griffin Dunne), who’s working to find a suitable treatment.
Woodroof begins taking the “illegal” cocktail of drugs and vitamins. Thirty days later he’s still alive – and sees a business opportunity in selling the pills to other HIV positive men. He can’t charge them directly for the drugs, so he sells membership and gives the drugs free on a monthly basis to the queue of men outside his “office” in a hotel room.
He enlists the help of HIV-positive transvestite Rayon (Jared Leto) to run the club, and fight the opposition of the authorities, who want to close him down.
McConaughey’s past in fluffy, chest-baring romcoms has done nothing to prepare us for his daring, emotional and totally convincing portrayal of Woodroof (who died in 1992, several years after being diagnosed with the virus).
Likewise, Leto is a revelation as Rayon, finding the heart in what could have been a cliched role.
With a total of six Oscar nominations, including best picture, Dallas Buyers Club may well emerge as one of the big winners on Oscar night.
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