4.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive profanity, strong sexual content, nudity and drug use
By Derrick Bang
Some heroes are born. Others are
made.
Kicking, screaming, scratching
and spitting every step of the way.
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| Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey, right) initially reacts with knee-jerk contempt when the cross-dressing Rayon (Jared Leto) offers to help establish a rather unusual business model. Soon, though, "just business" grows into something a great deal more profound. |
Ron Woodroof’s unexpected saga
wasn’t nearly as poetic or dramatically mesmerizing as is suggested in Jean-Marc
Vallée’s new film, Dallas Buyers Club,
but there’s no doubt that the real-life Woodroof was an unlikely champion for
the disenfranchised, much the way Oskar Schindler found his calling during
World War II.
Texas born-and-bred Woodroof was
a hard-living, harder-drinking electrical contractor when he was blindsided by
an HIV diagnosis in 1986, and given sixth months to live. (Vallée’s film shifts
this life-changing moment to 1985, to tie the unfolding drama to Rock Hudson’s
announcement, that July, that he had AIDS.)
Not one to blithely accept a
death sentence, Woodroof went into the research tank and emerged a year later
to found what became known as the Dallas Buyers Club: an underground source of
drugs not approved by the FDA for use in the United States ... but, in many
cases, legal in other countries and known to be helpful for HIV-positive
patients, and those with full-blown AIDS.
Woodroof’s story, and the Dallas
Buyers Club, were profiled in Bill Minutaglio’s compelling article in Dallas Life Magazine, published on Aug.
9, 1992. Woodroof died not quite a month later, on Sept. 12. During the seven
years he ran his guerrilla drug network, there’s no question he helped prolong
the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of desperately ill people ... just as
he prolonged his own life.
Interesting, then, that we’ve
waited two full decades for a film to be made about this feisty, foul-mouthed,
oddly charismatic Texas renegade.
Vallée’s film is powered by a galvanic
performance from Matthew McConaughey, who notoriously dropped 47 pounds in
order to convincingly play the emaciated Woodroof. That’s obviously a drastic
move, but it certainly lends considerable verisimilitude to what we see
onscreen, just as Christian Bale’s similar weight-loss routine brought
jaw-dropping realism to his portrayal of crack-addicted Dicky Eklund, in The Fighter.
But the intensity of
McConaughey’s performance here derives from a great deal more than his
painfully thin frame; he charges through this role with a level of desperation
that matches his character’s angry struggle to stay alive. And anger is the
right word, because Woodroof quickly comes to believe that the U.S. medical
establishment is, at best, moving much too slowly to battle a disease primarily
killing the nation’s “expendables”; or, at worst, actively conspiring with Big
Pharma to develop and deliver piecemeal treatment in a manner designed solely
to maximize profits.
