Dallas Buyers Club

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee
Rating: ***

At the heart of Dallas Buyers Club is a confrontation, a real-life fight in the ’80s between AIDS patient Ron Woodroof and America’s Food and Drug Administration over the smuggling and illegal distribution of unapproved drugs. It shows Woodroof’s atte­m­pts to make treatment readily available to AIDS patients, as against the questionable ethics of the means he emp­loys. Is it fair to get untes­ted treatments to patients rather than waiting for the medical establishment to take a stand on them? But the debate aside, Dallas Buyers Club crackles with life and is held together by the mercurial and energetic act by McCo­naug­hey as Wood­roof. The drastic loss of weight is shocking but McConau­ghey invests much more in the boozing, snorting, womanising, wild homophobe that he brings alive. There’s his initial denial of AIDS, how the disease knocks down the manly rodeo in him and makes him question his own macho self-image. The gradual transformation into an activist and entrepreneur and his gro­­wing love for the gay men he once abhorred is brilliantly realised. So is his relationship with his partner in crime, the transgender Rayon (a sup­erb, unrecognisable Jared Leto). But Garner as a sympathetic doctor pales in comparison.