McConaughey makes ‘Buyers Club’
Print Edition
The best parts of “Dallas Buyers Club” are of Matthew McConaughey, as HIV-positive Texas man Ron Woodroof, bucking like a bull in a Dallas hospital he refuses to let hold him.
Woodroof is a cowboy hat-wearing, middle finger-flipping trailer park rat who spends his time fornicating, drinking, doing drugs and evading debtors. Our first image of him (in what he’ll later recall as the moment of his HIV infection), is spied through the panels of a dark rodeo pen while he has sex with a blonde. He’s too messed up to much notice when a large man slides in behind him.
When Woodroof, an electrician, later turns up in the hospital, he’s diagnosed with HIV (this is 1985, early in the AIDS crisis). With a T-cell count of just nine, he’s told that he has 30 days to live.
Woodroof rages against his fate with unexpected tenacity and smarts: The life force of a low-life hedonist. He quickly zeroes in on drugs available internationally but not approved for use in the US by the Federal Drug Administration. “Dallas Buyers Club” plays out not as a fight against AIDS, but against the bureaucracy of the FDA and the coziness of drug companies with doctors. Denis O’Hare plays a blatantly villainous hospital doctor.
Woodruff begins smuggling in less toxic drugs from Mexico, Japan and Europe. He sets up a so-called “buyers club” with members of other HIV-afflicted Dallas men paying a monthly fee for drugs that prove more effective than the FDA-approved doses of AZT.
Suddenly an outcast among his heterosexual friends, Woodroof reluctantly warms to a new community — particularly a drug-addicted transsexual named Rayon (Jared Leto) who becomes his business partner. They run the buyers club out of a cheap motel, the unlikeliest pair of Bonnie and Clyde renegades yet. It’s a true story long in the making based on Woodroof’s remarkable late life.
But what “Dallas Buyers Club” is, ultimately, is the apotheosis of another transformation: McConaughey’s great U-turn. A few years after sinking into rote romantic comedies, “Dallas Buyers Club” tops an astonishing streak for the 43-year-old that has included “Mud,” “Magic Mike” and “Bernie.”
He lost more than 40 pounds for the role, and appears so gaunt as to wipe away any memory of his rosier, more superficial performances. McConaughey inhabits the clamoring, clawing Woodroof, whose zest for life flourishes with the meaning of a moral cause.
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