Review of Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club opens with a bang.  We're on rodeo grounds and Ron Woodroof a would be cowboy in his spare time and electrician in his regular joe job is giving it hard to two "ladies" under the stalls.  Right away we know this guy's no woos, he's a heterosexual full blooded male and it's important to note this since this is a movie about Aids and being HIV positive at the very beginnings of the deadly disease which will hit especially hard in the gay community.  For a time and in some circles it was even branded the queer disease.
The story is based on real life Ron Woodroof played in a go for broke performance by Matthew McConaughey.  The physical transformation of McConaughey is quite startling but I had seen quite a few previews of this film prior to going to see it in its entirety and therefore knew what to expect.
The time is 1985 Rock Hudson has died of Aids, panic has yet to grip the gay community but when people start dying in record numbers communities will start to organize all across the U.S.  In that respect founding the Dallas Buyers Club was not unique although it's portrayed as being quite singular in the film.
Woodroof is hospitalized after passing out in his trailer and told at the hospital that his blood has tested positive for the HIV virus, in short order he has thirty days to live.  One of the more sympathetic doctors is played by Jennifer Garner. She will become an unlikely ally as the story progresses.
Hard playing, hard boozing, pill popping, prostitute frequenting, sex addict Ron Woodroof is not a pleasant character.  He's a raging homophobic and thus considers it a supreme injustice to his manhood to have fallen prey to the queer disease.  I have to say that even after his so-called conversion and semi-acceptance of the gay/transgendered milieu he never quite grew on me.
Woodroof refuses to go easy into the night and becomes determined to procure himself with any illegal and unapproved medicine which will prolong his life.  While the disease is spreading pharmaceutical companies are competing to come up with a cocktail which will do just that while, at the same time, enhancing generously their bottom line.  Unfortunately clinical trials which will lead to an eventual approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) take too long and Woodroof eventually ends up in Mexico where he finds a cocktail which appears to be working.  He sets up a partnership with a transgendered woman called Rayon played by Jared Leto with sensitivity and panache.  Thus the Dallas Buyers Club is born.  Rayon is an invented character placed there to make Woodroof's conversion more plausible to the viewer.
I have read a few articles by gay activists condemning the portrayal of Rayon by a straight man.  I personally don't feel there is any merit to such criticism.  Throughout history men have portrayed women, women have portrayed men etc...Art should transcend such reductive arguments. It is not necessary for the portrayal of Rayon to be effective to have a transgendered actor playing the role arguments like that just muddy the waters.  The film was never meant to be an exhaustive chronology of the ravages of Aids rather it is the story of a man's journey in uncharted territory yet despite its pro-gay attitude the film never manages to overcome a certain lack of empathy for the people such as Rayon and other members of the gay community who are portrayed as extremely passive in the face of this horrible disease.
Nevertheless it is an appealing story of mitigated triumph over adversity. Woodroof is forced to confront a medical and pharmaceutical system disinclined to give all the help it can unless it can make a tidy profit.  His fight against the FDA is the real deal and the beating heart of the story. While Woodroof himself remains a problematic figure, at least for me, he does attain a certain measure of redemption for his early homophobic ways. The renowned Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée never sinks into sentimentality where sentimentality and romanticism might have been easy to mine.  The story is told in a straightforward manner without any embellishments and once again as in  the case of August:Osage County the acting elevates it above the ordinary.