Mathew McConaughey Stars in a Film About AIDS.

'Dallas Buyers Club' Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner. Directed by Jean Marc Vallee.


   'Dallas Buyers Club' opens with a mustached, pencil slim Matthew McConaughey in a rodeo, up close to the bull riders' pen. The film ends with McConaughey playing Ron Woodroof riding a bull in a rodeo. In between these moments, Woodroof has died.
      Woodroof is a cocaine-snorting, hard drinking, homophobic electrician. He's a Texan redneck who hates gays. Then suddenly he's HIV positive which came from screwing an infected woman and not wearing a condom.
    "You've tested positive for HIV," the doctor at a Dallas hospital tells Woodroof. "You have 30 days left" to live.
      A shell-shocked Woodroof can't believe this. Then he rebels against the verdict and the medically imposed use of the drug AZT that's supposed to help AIDS
 patients. Still a businessman, he sets up the Dallas Buyers Club which HIV infected people can join. Here they can buy alternative drugs that will keep them alive.
      In the U.S. of A. in the 1980's, which is where the film takes place, Woodroof's course of action leads  to clashes with the government. Along the way Woodroof meets Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Rayon is a transexual who at first disgusts Woodroof, but then he cures Woodroof of his homophobia.
      Director Jean Marc Vallee is a Quebecker who in this film shows us the grim side of HIV infected lives and the terrible prejudice the disease provokes. Yet there are also decent people in the film like Doctor Vass played by Griffin Dunne. Dunne saves lives in his Mexican clinic.
     "I want kids," Woodroof says at one point in the film. Yet Woodroof never did live to have children. His life, which is based on a true story, ended in 1992, seven years later than the Dallas doctor predicted.
     Matthew McConaughey has now changed in his film career from being a heavily muscled hunk, into now being an anorexic looking actor. "Dallas Buyers Club' sometimes goes over the top and sometimes becomes too sentimental. Still, it's well worth seeing.