Few screen actors have ever had a a year as good as Matthew McConaughey’s, who follows up his bravura work as an escaped convict in “Mud” with a tour-de-force as an unforgettable true-life Texan in Jean-Marc Vallee’s “Dallas Buyers Club.”
The film, which also contains a must-see performance by Jared Leto as a transsexual, portrays the almost unbelievable story of Ron Woodroof, a homophobic electrician and rodeo rider who becomes an unlikely AIDS activist when he’s diagnosed with HIV in 1985.
Given 30 days to live by the doctor who delivers the diagnosis, Woodroof becomes a self-taught expert who obtains drugs on the black market and travels to Mexico and other countries for treatments not then available in the United States.
For the next seven years of his life, Woodroof tirelessly battles with the U.S medical establishment, which at the time had approved a single drug — the very expensive and highly dangerous AZT — for AIDS, opening one of a series of illegal “clubs” that provided unauthorized drugs for free to members who paid a monthly fee.
McConaughey has never been better than as the charismatic Woodruff, who bonds with the gay community he previously despised after being shunned by his friends and losing his job after they learn about his diagnosis.
It’s a remarkable story, vividly told by Vallee. A virtually unrecognizable Leto tears your heart out as a drug-addict trannsexual who becomes Woodroof’s closest friend and collaborator, and Jennifer Garner does the best work of her career as a doctor who risks her career to help Woodruff.
“Dallas Buyers Club,” opening Nov. 1 in New York, is very serious Oscar bait.