STARRING MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, JARED LETO, GRIFFIN DUNNE AND JENNIFER GARNER.
REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I’ve never liked the actor Matthew McConaughey, but he’s so damn good in this based-on-real-events drama film that he won a Best Actor Oscar for it, and I whole-heartedly agree with the Academy’s choice, as it happens.
He’s virtually unrecognisable as Ron Woodroof, a Dallas electrician and rodeo cowboy who, in 1985, is hospitalised after receiving an electric shock at work and is told that he is HIV-positive, with such a low T-cell count that the doctor tells him he only has about another thirty days to live. Ron’s response will tell you the kind of charming individual he is when we first meet him:
‘Get the fuck outta here! I ain’t no fucking faggot. You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.’
Oh yes, our Ron is deeply sexist, foul-mouthed and homophobic; I don’t know how he feels about people of colour…! He’s devastated when his diagnosis sinks in (he remembers the intravenous drug-using prostitute from a few years back) and also when his friends, the lads with whom he’d normally hang out, drink himself insensible and pay hookers for sex, all reject him. This is because they assume he must be a ‘faggot’ to have contracted HIV. He even loses his big macho-man job at the rodeo and his trailer park home, all thanks to good old-fashioned ignorance, prejudice and fear.
Ron demands drugs, all the drugs he needs to fix him, from Doctors Saks (Jennifer Garner) and Sevard of his local hospital. All that’s available to AIDS patients at the time is AZT, which can kill off more cells than it helps if given in the high doses normally given to AIDS patients. This is what Ron finds out for himself when his condition worsens after taking AZT through the hospital.
A dying Ron pops off to Mexico to see a Dr. Vass, who’s been struck off the medical register in the States for treating AIDS patients with unapproved drugs, that is to say, drugs which may not necessarily be illegal but which may not be approved by the all-important FDA, the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Vass treats Ron with a cocktail of his own drugs and food supplements, and, three months later, Ron is feeling much more like his old self. Ron realises that he can make money out of importing these drugs himself and selling them directly to AIDS patients who are willing to pay a one-off fee of four hundred bucks. Thus, the Dallas Buyers Club is born…
Ron’s partner in not-quite-a-crime is Rayon, a trans woman whom he meets in the hospital. There’s often a trope like this in AIDS movies: the tough, possibly homophobic male who has somehow found himself HIV-positive comes in contact with the kind of person to whom he’d normally refer as a ‘raving queer’ or a faggot or a queen. ‘Don’t put yo’ faggotty-ass hands on me,’ and so on.
The gay or trans person normally initiates contact by being friendly, upbeat and often making a joke of their shared plight. The macho man initially rebuffs the gay or trans person, but gradually softens towards him/her when he discovers that this person is the one other human being in his life who knows what he’s going through and fully, properly empathises with him.
This is the way of it with Ron and Rayon. The latter is beautifully played by another actor who is virtually unrecognisable as himself, the normally-plays-a-tough-guy Jared Leto. Leto won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Rayon, who has been rejected by her family for being gay, and they don’t even know she has AIDS yet.
The scenes with Rayon and her lover, a young man also dying of AIDS, are just tragic, and it doesn’t get any cheerier when Rayon bravely goes to her homophobic dad and asks him for the money Ron needs to keep the Dallas Buyers Club open and operational for the people who need it.
One of my favourite moments in the film is when Ron and Rayon are shopping for food together at the supermarket, and Ron forces a deeply homophobic old mate of his to be polite to Rayon and shake her hand. One gets the impression that it’s the nicest thing that anyone has done for Rayon in many a long day.
Ron and his Club run afoul of the cops and the FDA, but it’s all part and parcel of the chaotic life that Ron has only partially chosen for himself. When he eventually dies, it’s a good seven years since he was told by Dr. Sevard that he only had thirty days to live.
He buys himself seven years more of life through his willingness to go out and find the drugs that work for him and others. In that seven years, doctors like Ron’s good friend Dr. Eve Saks come to realise that the drug AZT may be more efficacious at a lower dosage, but I’m no doctor, so you might want to research those medical facts for yourselves. I do know that the drugs Ron used and advocated the use of for others were not always effective or even necessarily safe, and that’s why he was often in conflict with the FDA.
The film is set in the era when the American public feared and reviled AIDS patients because not much information was available to the public at the time, other than the fact that AIDS was initially known as ‘the gay plague’ or ‘gay cancer,’ not exactly terms to invite tolerance, compassion and understanding.
The American government of that period allocated much less money for AIDS research than it did for other aspects of the health service, even though full-blown AIDS had a one hundred percent mortality rate in these scary years.
Early treatments often had horrible side-effects too. By the time the mid-Nineties rolled around, it was discovered that AZT worked quite well in conjunction with two other anti-virals, as this reduced the chances of the virus becoming immune to any one treatment, but that all came too late for Ron and Rayon.
The film is grim, depressing in places and sublimely touching in others. McConaughey and Leto are superb in their roles and that’s about all I can say about the film. Watch it if you can, because it’s a great inspirational story and a masterclass in character acting.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv
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