Evan Agostini, via Invision, via Associated Press Matthew McConaughey at the Toronto International Film Festival.TORONTO â€" One of the great stories right now in movies is the resurrection of Matthew McConaughey. His transformation from a lazily uncommitted prop in throwaways like “Fool’s Gold†to one of the most appealing actors working in American film today began a few years ago, with the likes of “Bernie†and “The Lincoln Lawyer,†and continues with “Dallas Buyers Club,†which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, this fine movie tracks another rebirth, that of Ron Woodroof, a Texas electrician who, beginning in the mid-1980s, became n accidental AIDS activist.
A lot has already been made of Mr. McConaughey’s physical transformation to play the part (he dropped almost 40 pounds), and the chatter will only increase when the movie opens on Nov. 1. When you first see Ron, his shoulders are stooped and rolled forward, and it looks as if his body is collapsing, caving in on him like a piece of decaying fruit. He’s wearing sunglasses that hide eyes that are always looking for the next angle, and he has a handlebar mustache that rides a smile that can’t help but regularly, perhaps habitually, turn into a smirk. Perched on his head is a white cowboy hat, that enduring symbol of virtue. It’s a hat that Ron eventually grows into in a story of a man waging a battle on two inexorably twinned fronts: his ravaged body and newly wakened conscience.
Before long, the unrepentantly homophobic Ron has learned that he has the same disease that has felled the recent headliner Rock Hudson and that he has 30 days to live. The doctors (Jennifer Garner, Denis O’Hare) are regretful, but nothing can be done. Ron, who has the heart of a true hustler (he runs the illegal gambling at the local rodeo), starts working any angle he can, including back-alley doses of AZT he gulps like candy. Between slugs of booze, he also begins investigating other options, putting in hours at the local library, where he reads about possible cures. He ends up in Mexico, where he meets a doctor (Griffin Dunne) who’s exploring unconventional possibilities, including drugs not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Soon enough, Ron begins smuggling those drugs into the United States and selling them to other people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and he enters into an entrepreneurial partnership with a drag queen, Rayon (an equally skeletal Jared Leto). Mr. Vallée, whose movies include “The Young Victoria,†puts a lightly comic spin on Ron’s underground exploits - at one point he disguises himself as the world’s sleaziest priest - that goes a long way to ensuring that the heartache in “Dallas Buyers Club†never interrupts the nice, breezy flow. That makes this fundamentally desperate story go down more easily, though there’s something disconcerting about how this ghastly chapter in American history, with its multitudes of dead and government inaction, has been so neatly packaged.
As it happens, even the story of a white straight man’s struggle against inaction and bigotry took forever to get into production. In 2002, an item in Variety announced that the writer Guillermo Arriaga was attached, Brad Pitt was interested and Marc Forster might direct. Mr. Pitt, who appears interested and subsequently uninterested in every male role in the industry, was soon replaced in press tidbits by Ryan Gosling, with the director Craig Gillespie tagging alongside. Mr. McConaughey’s name entered the mix in 2011, along with that of Mr. Vallée. The movie was originally at Universal and, in one of those full-circle ironies, is being released by a division, Focus Features.
“It’s not exactly the movie that studios are throwing money at these days,†Mr. McConaughey said in The Los Angeles Times in 2011. Yet now the studio that once rejected the movie will certainly reap its rewards.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 9, 2013
An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to the agency that approves drugs for market in the United States. It's the Food and Drug Administration, not the Federal Drug Administration.
In an earlier version of this post, the name of the film's director was misspelled in one instance. As correctly noted elsewhere, he is Jean-Marc Vallée, not Jean-Marc Valleé.
