Dallas Buyers Club by Jean-Marc Vallée starring Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Garner (2013)
Dallas Buyers Club is inspired by a true story that took place in Texas between 1985 and 1988. Ron Woodroof is an electrician and rodeo cowboy addicted to alcohol, drugs, and sex, and strongly homophobic, who discovers that he has HIV. Despite being given only thirty days to live, and despite the lack of effective treatments, he refuses to give up. After researching treatment protocols used in other countries, he begins taking alternative therapies smuggled in from Mexico that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These drugs allow him to regain his strength and live a relatively normal life, even though they do not cure the virus permanently. Ron then decides to found a buyers club that distributes medication to other HIV-positive people in exchange for club membership. Along the way, he faces legal troubles, grows closer to the LGBTQ+ community, and survives for another seven years.
The film shows that the protagonist confronts three different forms of exclusion. The first is medical exclusion, because AZT — the only officially approved drug in the United States at the time — is actually toxic and worsens the condition of many patients, including Ron. Doctors have no legal alternatives to offer even though they know of more promising antiviral treatments. Here, exclusion stems from scientific delay and bureaucracy. If the official protocol is killing you, you are abandoned by the very system that is supposed to heal you.
The second is social exclusion. Immediately after his diagnosis and the visible signs of illness, Ron loses friends, work, and credibility. In those years, AIDS was considered “a gay disease,” and in his macho environment he is treated like a leper even though he is heterosexual. His cowboy friends avoid him, insult him, and refuse to let him into bars. He loses his job because no one wants to touch anything he has touched. The disease becomes a moral label. You are no longer a person with a job and a history; you are simply “the AIDS patient.” Stigma creates a form of social quarantine even when contagion has nothing to do with it. Inclusion only returns when Ron begins spending time with Rayon, a transgender woman, and other HIV-positive people, and in some ways the club creates an alternative community because mainstream society has expelled him. The protagonist evolves from being homophobic and selfish into an activist because the healthcare system excludes him.
The third is exclusion from the system itself. When he challenges the scientific establishment and the pharmaceutical industry — with the FDA blocking more effective foreign drugs in order to protect American companies — the paradox is that Ron must become an outlaw in order to survive. Technically, he is not violating laws regarding drug sales, yet the FDA persecutes him anyway and labels him a drug dealer. Here, exclusion is structural. If you do not have the money to travel abroad or hire lawyers, you are doomed. The club becomes a parallel healthcare system, created because the official one protects the market before protecting people’s health. The only possible path becomes illegal self-management.
We could say that the film presents three levels of walls. The first is biological and bureaucratic, the second cultural, and the third economic-political. Ron tears all of them down, but only by paying the price of becoming an outlaw in order to stay alive.
The film received six Academy Awards nominations — including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay — and won in three categories: Best Actor for the extraordinary Matthew McConaughey, Best Supporting Actor for Jared Leto, whose performance is rich in emotional nuance, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The screenplay, suspended between cruelty and tenderness, truly deserved recognition: sharp and at times unpleasant, yet always incisive and capable of moments of intense emotional power. Jean-Marc Vallée’s direction, fully in control of both the narrative material and the expressive medium, follows the protagonist with camera movements that often resemble documentary filmmaking. There is no doubt that the strength of the film’s social critique rests on its ability to use every visual and verbal tool available to portray effectively the transformation of this man during his struggle to survive. Ron does not want to be a hero, yet his fight for personal survival becomes a fundamental ethical battle.
The enduring value and strength of the film, even today — when effective antiretroviral therapies exist to combat HIV and AIDS may no longer carry the same stigma — lies in its denunciation of exclusion, where it is not the virus itself that excludes people, but the way society labels and manages the disease. The film ultimately argues that inclusion depends both on access to healthcare and on the collapse of prejudice.