Dallas Buyers Club

With Dallas Buyers Club comes a lot of expectations.  The film is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture.  Now, expectations can be a good thing sometimes.  Especially bad expectations.  Bad expectations at least leave you with the possibility that the film will exceed your expectations.  But with positive expectations or even hype, a good film can feel disappointing just because it wasn't a great film.  Dallas Buyers Club rides the line between good and great.  If this had been back when the Oscars only had five nominees for Best Picture, then this film would not make the cut.  With the field of nine candidates this year, Dallas Buyers Club feels just right.  Good enough to get noticed but not actually a real contender to win.

The movie is "inspired by true events."  Basically, a man named Ron Woodroof had AIDS in the 1980s and the rest of the film is a fabrication.  However, that does not detract from what is a story of a homophobic man who is diagnosed HIV positive and starts smuggling pharmaceutical drugs to treat his disease.  He starts a "buyers club" to take advantage of a loophole in FDA regulations.  This allows him to sell these drugs to other HIV patients in the Dallas area.  Through his interactions with the gay community of Texas, he begins to lose his bigotry and become a better man.

This is a very performance driven movie.  And since the story is entirely about Ron Woodroof, it becomes a very Matthew McConaughey driven movie.  McConaughey is really great in this.  To say nothing of his massive weightloss, he is performing a range of emotions that I didn't know he could perform.  It not the biggest and loudest acting, but it never feels false.  I think part of why he's nominated for Best Actor is that no one expected this kind of acting from McConaughey.  But I don't think that that's all of it.  He's really phenomenal.  Jared Leto is also nominated but for Best Supporting Actor.  He also lost a crazy amount of weight for the film.  But the real power of his performance is that he is acting on one level where he's a flamboyant cross-dresser complete with a catty attitude and a lisp.  It's almost wildly stereotypical and, if that was the performance alone, would seem very dull.  But Leto plays Rayon on another level as a person who uses that flamboyance as a shield between the real man and the world.  The powerhouse scenes for Leto are when Rayon dresses in a business suit and goes to his father without makeup (without a shield basically) and in the end as the disease begins to take a stronger hold.  It's those scenes that give an insight into how multifaceted his performance is.

This isn't a depressing movie, but it is a very heavy movie.  It's constant drama and conflict.  There are very few moments of levity.  Dallas Buyers Club won't set the world on fire.  It'll probably be largely forgotten in a couple years, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't check it out.  Basically, watch it before the Oscars.  It's definitely worth your while.

8.5 out of 10