thoughts on Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodruff, an electrician and bull rider living in Dallas in the mid-1980s. He learns, following an electrical accident that puts him in the emergency room, that he is HIV positive.  Early scenes of the film have established that he was at a higher-than-average risk for this, and that there were signs of this long before he was diagnosed; he has sex with multiple partners (often, multiple partners at one time), and we see him coughing frequently and getting dizzy and collapsing at one point, though you can imagine he chalks this up to the fact that he drinks, snorts coke, and gets into a lot of fights.  The doctors (played by Denis O'Hare and Jennifer Garner) give him thirty days to live.  Ron spends the first few of these days in denial; he thinks that only gay men get HIV.  However, after he does some research and learns that the virus is spread through unprotected sex, he realizes that this is actually happening. 

He goes back to Dr. Saks (Garner) and asks her about a then-new drug called AZT, which is currently being tested on human subjects (Saks thinks the testing process has been rushed).  Since the drug is still being tested, Saks can't prescribe it to him, but he manages to work out a deal with a janitor, who sneaks him some.  Eventually, someone at the hospital figures out that some is going missing and begins locking it up, at which point the janitor tells Ron about a doctor in Mexico.  Ron is initially skeptical, but driven to desperation-- both by his sudden lack of AZT and by the fact that virtually everyone in his life has turned their back on him; he even returns to his trailer to find an eviction notice on the door-- he checks it out. 

The doctor there prescribes drugs that work better (AZT is apparently very hard on the body, especially when one has a weakened immune system), and Ron arranges to take a large amount of them back to the United States.  With the help of a transgendered man named Rayon (Jared Leto) that Ron met in the hospital, he sets up a "buyers' club" in which people can get whatever drugs they want for a monthly membership fee.  He is able to do this for a time because the drugs are not technically illegal, just unapproved, and because he's not actually selling the drugs, but rather membership in the club.  However, he faces opposition from the medical/pharmaceutical community (Dr. Saks is sympathetic, but there's only so much she can do), and is also continually hindered by the fact that his health is continually declining, as is Rayon's.

The movie is about several things.  It's about how completely awful it must have been to have AIDS in the eighties, when they hadn't figured out how to treat it effectively and when the public had some pretty major misconceptions about how you contracted it. It's about the fact that sometimes the medical community is hindered in their efforts to provide the best care and treatment possible for their patients by regulations, restrictions, and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.  And, it's about Ron, who starts out just trying just to survive and winds up helping a lot of people, and who grows less homophobic through his unlikely friendship with Rayon.

The story itself is very interesting.  It felt a bit longer than its slightly less than two-hour running time, perhaps because it's hard to tell where the story is going; after he establishes the buyers' club, you're not really sure what will happen next or what you should want to happen next, and the main characters' deaths are a forgone conclusion.  However, it informed me about things/events I didn't know a lot about and made me want to learn more, which I appreciated.  The performances are solid across the board.  Jared Leto's character is the most likeable, and I think his performance was probably the strongest, though I have no complaints about McConaughey's, either.  Garner has the least to work with of the three, but her role is important in that 1) you need someone from the medical community that isn't villainous, as some of the other medical professionals come across and 2) Ron needs someone neutral, sympathetic, and informed to talk things through with.  There's sort of a romantic vibe between the two of them that not much comes of, but that's really not what the movie was about.

Anyway, I thought it was a solid movie.  Worth seeing.