It’s a shame this movie merely describes the 1980s. It should have been produced in the 1980s. Our country and the world desperately needed AIDS understanding during the Reagan era. And here we have the embodiment of America itself in Texan hustler homophobe bigot Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey). Ron’s not the best hustler. He’s introduced losing a bet at a rodeo (and even slugs a cop to avoid the collection mob). In fact, you’d swear Ron was kind of a blockhead. When he’s diagnosed with AIDS after a collapse, he assumes full blown denial mode, like America itself. And then, when you’ve just about written him off, he actually does his homework and turns a death sentence into a thriving economic opportunity. And this why we love our country.
You get the idea that Ron Woodruff isn’t just a homophobe; he’s sexist, almost certainly xenophobic, and probably a world class bigot. I haven’t got good evidence for the two latter; they just fit the profile. There’s nothing like “30 days to live” to give a new perspective on the world. For starters, Ron has to accept he’s dying and then make a passionate plea to live. Silent screen cuts mark the passage of time (“Day 7,” etc.) Ron doesn’t have a whole lot of options and the hospital doesn’t know a whole lot about what makes HIV not-so-positive. He bribes a nurse to steal AZT for him. On Day 29, his source dries up and Ron collapses behind the dumpster in the hospital loading zone. All the hospital cares 
about is where Ron got his AZT; all Ron cares about is life. These are incompatible motivations. Armed with an address and desperation, Ron heads to Mexico to find an exile who has figured out how to keep AIDS patients alive. Months later, Ron returns with his life and much more.
Dallas Buyers Club, among many other things, is a completely unsubtle dig at American hospital care and the FDA. If the bottom line in American health care were ever to make and to keep Americans healthy, this movie would/could never have been made.
Weird seeing a movie where McConaughey is not the prettiest man in the room. His scarecrow-like emaciated appearance with a gunslinger moustache and belt about eight loops too large suggests a denizen from an overturned rock or somebody you’d find at a hate rally with a misspelled sign. Of course, this doesn’t compare to (guaranteed nomination) Jared Leto as Rayon, a true member of the letters I don’t know in “LGBT.” I’m used to seeing drug addicted Leto. Sure, that’s his bag. But I’ve never seen quite so realistic a transgender portrait. I’ve seen transgender portrayals before. They look like this: “check it out; I’m a guy in a dress. Woooo! Isn’t that scandalous?” Rayon here is a real person. She meets Ron in the adjacent hospital bed. Ron is repulsed, but Rayon plies him with gambling. There isn’t an ode to “love me — love my dress,” it’s just a transgender individual who probably could use a friend, or, barring that, company of any kind. Ron will do. As they become business partners, Rayon never forces herself on Ron; he has to see through the bigotry without an impassioned speech or some glorious epiphany.
Dallas Buyers Club not everybody’s 250 mL of tea. There are hospital wards. There’s AIDS; there are characters repressed folk will find objectionable. It’s a movie about commerce and intolerance, but mostly of the exposure of sanctioned stupidity. If you have 30 days to live, why should any man, woman, hospital, government or affirmation calendar tell you what you can and cannot do with your body?
Ron’s life had been served a pile of manure
His T-cell had diminished to fewer and fewer
But don’t worry, Ron
It’s America, son
Death is an entrepreneur
Rated R, 117 Minutes
D: Jean-Marc Vallée
W: Craig Borten (screenplay), Melisa Wallack
Genre: Social awareness
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The LGBT Army
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Homophobes
