Dallas Buyers Club - another great McConaughey performance

I don't want to use the tern 'Oscar-bait' to describe Dallas Buyers Club, since it's a term loaded with a negative connotation, but this is precisely the kind of film that it's no surprise to discover easily courted the Academy when it came to awards season this year.  With its HIV positive lead character struggling through illness, then living the American dream and then learning something about not being such a homophobe while exposing the evils of big pharma - it ticks a lot of boxes.  But fear not - Dallas Buyers Club is still a very good film.

The plot gets going pretty quickly and uses clever storytelling to paint a picture of the life of our lead character Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey).  He is a boozing, whoring redneck from Texas who works casually on that state's many oil fields.  One day a minor accident lands him in hospital, and a routine blood test reveals he has AIDS.  His doctor (Jennifer Garner) gives him 30 days to live.  This is the 1980s, and so the reaction of all his 'friends' is to disown him and treat him as an outcast - a gay outcast no less.  He reacts with rage, doing everything he can to get his hands on the drugs he thinks he needs to survive and lashing out at any hint he might be labelled a homosexual.  A brush with death lands him in a Mexican clinic though, where he learns about a series of drugs that control symptoms of AIDS but are illegal in the US.  He resolves to set up his own club to import the drugs into the US.  It's a club that people can pay a membership fee to be in, and then they get all the drugs they need.  This technically bypasses US law since he isn't actually selling the drugs on.  It's the Dallas Buyers Club.

It's an excellent film that just about rides the line between being overly mawkish and actually having a heart.  McConaughey is outstanding as seems to be standard for him these days - his recent performance in the TV drama series True Detective underlining that.  Here he plays a character who is superficially simple, but has many layers that only emerge when he finds his true calling - to help the HIV positive community of Texas get the drugs that Big Pharma doesn't want them to have.  Jared Leto won an Oscar for his portrayal of the HIV positive transvestite Rayon, who becomes Ron's friend and helps him to realise that gay men aren't as one-dimensional as he thinks.  Again this sounds pretty simplistic and sentimental, but the film just about has enough heart and realism to make it work.

Overall, another very impressive performance by Matthew McConaughey.  It's steeped in the traditions of the liberal Holywood elite, and so is probably a film that Bill O'Reilly would hate.  For these reasons alone, Dallas Buyers' Club is definitely worthy of your time.