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'Dallas Buyers Club'
Rated R: for pervasive language, some strong sexual content, nudity and drug use
Running time: 117 minutes
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In the first scene of "Dallas Buyers Club," we see a man riding a bucking bronco while, off in the shadows, in another part of the rodeo, a man and a woman are having some very quick, impersonal sex. The irony of the moment is that it's not the cowboy, getting tossed and thrown around the ring, who is engaging in the more dangerous activity.
"Dallas Buyers Club" is the true story of Ron Woodroof, an electrician and rodeo enthusiast who was so contrary, so shady and so uncooperative that he figured out a way to live seven years with AIDS, despite being told he only had a month to live in 1985. He was not the nicest guy. A ladies' man, a borderline drunkard and a complete homophobe, he did everything he could to stay alive - and ended up helping a lot of other people in the process.
It's a role that an actor would kill for, and for Matthew McConaughey it marks the culmination of two solid years of smart choices and good films. Just a few years ago, he was known for taking off his shirt in silly romantic comedies. Then came "The Lincoln Lawyer," "Bernie," "Killer Joe," "Mud" and "Magic Mike," and McConaughey transformed into someone whose name on a picture meant quality. Yet all that was just a buildup for this.
His physical transformation in "Dallas Buyers Club" is dramatic in itself. If Woodroof really looked the way McConaughey does here - and photos indicate that he did - one wonders how he didn't go running to a doctor months earlier. McConaughey is so skinny that his head looks small. He looks like his thick hair and mustache are sucking all the nutrients from his face. He has that awful look so reminiscent of AIDS in the 1980s - of age grafted onto youth, where the body is thin and creaky and the face is hollowed out and sallow, and yet the eyes staring out are young.
"Dallas Buyers Club" takes audiences back to the worst of the AIDS crisis, where the disease was a death sentence, and the public's terror and hostility were at its height. When Ron finds out that he has AIDS, his first impulse is to deny it and to threaten the doctor (Dennis O'Keefe) who asks whether he has "engaged in homosexual activity." He storms out determined to maintain his old life - of sex parties, drugs and drinking - but within days, McConaughey shows us the lonely and dumbfounded look of a man who has made the dread transition, from the land of the well to the land of the sick.
At first, Ron schemes to get AZT, an experimental treatment and the only one approved at the time. Soon he is going over the border from Texas into Mexico to get other, less toxic drugs. Seeing a way to make a buck and stay alive at the same time, he starts bringing the drugs into the United States. Jared Leto plays Rayon, a transsexual who becomes Ron's liaison to the gay market; that is, to the people most interested in AIDS drugs.
Audiences glory in the partnerships of opposites because it makes us feel that all bridges can be crossed and anything is possible. As played by McConaughey, Ron remains a harsh and lowdown man, interested mostly in money and a good time, and neither he nor director Jean-Marc Valle overplays Ron's awakening moral sense. There are no corny close-ups indicating some internal realization. We just infer the change from his actions - for example, in his minor but palpable shift from disdain to irritated concern in his dealings with Rayon, who, whether Ron knows it or not, is the best friend he's got.
As for Leto, he takes a role that is physically flamboyant and doesn't get seduced by that. Rather, he inhabits the character's internal life, all the secrets and contradictions - Rayon's mix of garishness and delicacy, grandeur and self-loathing, gallantry and despair - and the result is something deep and lovely. Not that it matters, but it turns out that Rayon is a creation of the filmmakers, and so is the impossibly sweet doctor played by Jennifer Garner.
Perhaps the real-life history did need an intervention. The limits of "Dallas Buyers Club" are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.
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