Throughout Matthew McConaughey’s career, he’s exerted a certain level of charisma and charm in every role he’s played. Even in this reinvented hot streak of his career where he’s played sleazy, scary and strange characters who could not be more off type from his rom-com roots, there’s a certain mark of personality that has allowed him to settle into yet another comfort zone.
His performance in “Dallas Buyers Club” is different, one that drains him of any likability and finds him at this lowest point. Doing purely lived-in and physical work, McConaughey shows his abrasive, lewd, intense and vulgar dark side before winning us over again. This may not be the showiest performance of his recent run of movies, but it’s the one that demonstrates the most range, the most compassion and the most chance at winning him an Oscar.
“Dallas Buyers Club” is the true story of Ron Woodroof, a slimy electrician and rodeo jockey in Texas in the 1980s. Despite his lanky appearance (McConaughey lost nearly 40 pounds for the role), greasy hair and scummy potty mouth, he still finds himself having sex with women and “$100 hookers” in his trailer home and in dark corners of the rodeo arena.
After being brought to the hospital due to an accident at his job, the doctors inform him that he has tested positive for HIV, that it has already become AIDS and that he has roughly 30 days to live. Woodroof is staunchly heterosexual and shockingly bigoted and refuses to believe he has a disease like “that Rock Cocksucker Hudson” until he does his own research and pleads for help from Dallas Mercy’s Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner).
She gives Woodruff two options: a support group where he can “go get a hug from a bunch of faggots” or a double blind test of a drug called AZT, in which some patients will only receive “sugar pills,” better known as placebos. Continue reading “Dallas Buyers Club”