Dallas Buyers Club [Review by Haus]

Dallas Buyers Club is bare-bones storytelling in most every way. And like American Hustle, it’s nominated on the strength of its lead performances.

In this biopic, Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a hard-knock Texas electrician and rodeo dude in the late 1980s who discovers he has advanced AIDS. He’s straight and a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe, which adds to his challenges given that HIV at this time was still seen predominantly as a gay disease. Told he has 30 days to live — and we just about believe it, thanks to McConaughey’s Machinist-esque physique — he thrashes about in deserved melancholy for a while, ostracized by his coworkers who’re sure he must be gay.

It’s not long before he hears of a trial run of the antiretroviral drug AZT (which in case you’re interested, is a nucleotide analog preferentially incorporated into growing chains by the virus’s reverse transcriptase, thereby creating dead ends). Unable to get in on the trial, Woodroof resorts to underground means to try AZT.  When his unsupervised treatment run nearly ends his life, he starts importing and stockpiling other medications, ultimately setting up a membership-driven “buyers club” to freely distribute drugs to paying members, thus circumventing FDA regulations against the sale of unapproved medications.

It’s an interesting and true story, though I think I’m just too healthy to endorse Woodroof’s approach as at all a good idea. (I suspect seeing as-yet-unapproved treatments for your terminal illness circulating just out of reach must be maddening indeed.)

McConaughey plays Woodroof straight and rude, charting his arc from barely-likeable laborer to a salvation of sorts within the very subculture he so despised.  Along the way he meets Jared Leto‘s transvestite and eventually softens a tad through sheer necessity, though this is played well and never schmaltzy. With every additional day Woodroof extends his life, he becomes incrementally and reluctantly better as a person, driven by the purity of focus that only this type of situation can provide. Jennifer Garner is wholesome as a doctor with a good heart but no good options. 

McConaughey and Leto both do a remarkable job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one or both is recognized for it come Oscar Sunday. That said, I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as others seem to. Perhaps we’re not meant to, given the subject matter.

First and perhaps chiefly, I found it flat out hard to watch the skeletal leads casting about. The movie is unsurprisingly depressing at times, but also a bit flat as a story and I never warmed to what Ron sought to do or how he sought to do it. The environment is bleak — a small, mean little late-80s world of motels, hospitals, and trailers, mostly. (There’s also a prominent and wholly anachronistic Lamborghini Murcielago poster on his wall — a car fourteen years in the future. I can’t be the only person who noticed this.) What’s more, the film undertakes to aggressively vilify AZT, which seems a tad unfair given that AZT was a truly seminal treatment in its day and that it (or similar nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors) remains, as far as I know at least, a key component of even today’s HAART treatment regimen.

But Dallas Buyers Club isn’t really an AIDS movie, or a gay culture movie, or whatever. It’s a vehicle for McConaughey and Leto to lose scary amounts of weight and deliver raw performances on screen. If you can handle that for a couple of hours, here you’ll find these actors at their best. But it’s a haunting and, let’s face it, largely unpleasant picture.

HAUS VERDICT: Skeletal McConaughey delivers one of the strongest performances of the year, but it’s tough to enjoy.