Rating: 4 ½
Having won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild awards, and having been released yesterday, I decided to give "Dallas Buyers Club" my attention for two hours last night. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) is a rodeo cowboy and oil rig electrician in Texas who finds out he's not only HIV positive, but that it has progressed to AIDS. Now, in 1985, for a rough and tough Texas cowboy to find out he has a disease largely associated with the homosexual community, it's probably a bit like being a blind white-supremacist and then finding out you're black. Woodruff is given 30 days to live and told there are no drugs he can take to get better. Upset with his doctors and his situation, Woodruff decides to take matters into his own hands; he begins importing drugs and then giving them away to members who pay to be part of his club. He runs the Dallas Buyers Club with the help of Rayon, a transgender woman played by Jared Leto. Rayon and Woodruff met while getting treatment from Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) at Dallas Mercy Hospital. Leto, McConaughey, and Garner all do a wonderful job portraying their characters; which is nice because character study films are only enjoyable when the people playing the characters are believable. When I think about who should win Best Actor, I'm picking between McConaughey and Chiwetel Ejiofor from "12 Years a Slave". They both deserve recognition for driving the action in their films. I'd compare McConauhey to Peyton Manning and Ejiofor to Tom Brady: McConaughey delivers a stunning performance with a phenomenal supporting cast, but Ejiofor gets overlooked while doing more-with-less than most could. I'm not saying the supporting cast of "12 Years a Slave" is poor, far from it, what I'm saying is that Ejiofor brings the rest of the cast up to his level in his performance. Leto is believable as the drug-addled trans woman, but he wasn't the best supporting actor of the year; Barkhad Abdi was in "Captain Phillips". I don't know what the message is when playing a transgender woman pretty much gets you the award, but I know the same thing occurs when you play somebody with a mental illness. Regardless, Leto is superb, just not more essential to the film or its cast than Abdi's pirate, Muse. People I've talked to say they have little interest in "Dallas Buyers Club" because it's depressing. Truth be told, the movie isn't depressing, it's empowering. It's the tale of a man who decided to take life by the horns and ride it out on his own terms.
