3.5 Stars (out of four)
Dallas Buyers Club, as the name suggests, takes place in early 1980s Dallas, just as the so-called "gay flu" began to spread like wildfire. This was before it was well-known that HIV could be passed through heterosexual contact. McConaughey plays Ron Woodruff, a hard partying, homophobic rodeo bullrider in the advanced stages of AIDS from unprotected sex with an intravenous drug user. When diagnosed and given a prognosis of 30 days to live, he predictably reacts angrily at the implication he is gay. He is then shunned by all his friends and evicted from his house. He learns there is a new, experimental drug being tested to alleviate the HIV symptoms, and bribes his way to get medication. What Woodruff doesn't know is the medication is like chemotherapy, in that the medication destroys everything, making him worse than before. In desperation, he goes to Mexico and finds an exiled, unlicensed doctor who is doing experiments with another drug and a regimen of vitamins and proteins, all of which are legal, but unregulated and unapproved for use by the FDA. To Woodruff's surprise, he gets better with the drug and hatches a plan to smuggle them into the US and set up a buyers club. These were membership clubs where people would buy these unlicensed drugs located in several cities throughout the US. He meets Rayon, a transvestite who wants to be a transsexual, one night in the hospital. Rayon provides Woodruff his first clients and gradually, the two become friends. Woodruff is constantly harassed by the medical field as well as regulators and law enforcement. He finally unsuccessfully sues the FDA for keeping the drug cocktails off the street and eventually dies at the end, several thousand days after his initial 30-day prognosis.
What I loved so much about this movie is its humanity. It takes characters who would never under any other circumstances be inclined to like or even talk to one another. Yet, even if the person is repugnant to us, the movie says, if you get past the superficials and get to know the person underneath, the rest seems so silly. I can't help but be moved by the tenderness and care the people had for each other in the end. If only the world was more like them. So why not four stars? Obviously, this is an issues movie told "based on a true story." It obviously has a point of view and bias that is a little too transparent. There is no doubt the conservative backlash in Reagan's America slowed the research on HIV/AIDS. After all, it only affected gays and drug users, so no one who really matters is hurt, and the sinners were suffering God's judgement on them, the prevailing wisdom seemed to say. I can't help but wonder if more was done to combat this disease in its early stages, it may not have become the Black Death of the end of the 20th century. While all this is speculative, the movie falls back on the trite villain of the new millennium, big corporations. This movie more than hints that it was big drug corporations that kept research at a minimum. I have to say, this is getting old. The faceless corporation has replaced our fears of the faceless Red Menace and Yelliw Menace and provided us with a new boogieman watchword. We now no longer need to prove something with facts, we just refer to our pedantic bad guy, the corporation. This transference is childish and distressingly ubiquitous in the national debate. Because of this, the movie dragged in places for me, sacrificing good storytelling whose implications any intelligent adult could understand. Instead, the movie whines like a child and is ultimately a tad insulting in its dramatic simplification of the problem. But otherwise, a really good film that is worth a watch.
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