“Dallas Buyers Club” is out on DVD today!

Dallas Buyers Club was released on DVD today and if you have not seen it yet, you should do so now.

I attended the film’s premiere last October and it was so absorbing that through some of it, I actually forgot where I was.

It stars Oscar nominee Matthew McConaughey as real-life Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof, whose free-wheeling life was overturned in 1985 when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive and given 30 days to live.

From the first frame, it is not the beefcake McConaughey we expect to see in his movies. This is an emaciated man who is clearly ill and barely holding it together. He is down to 135 pounds in this movie after losing 50 pounds for the role and it makes his fragility quite real.

The performance is convincing on so many levels. This is not a guy we especially like because he’s a jerk and a homophobe. But he grows as he fights for his life and takes his destiny into his own hands.

It’s the performance of McConaughey’s career and he deserves to win the Academy Award for best actor. I have felt this immediately certain very rarely – last year after seeing Daniel-Day Lewis in Lincoln and more than 20 years ago after seeing Dustin Hoffman in Rainman.

In the film, McConaughey’s character tracks down alternative treatments from all over the world by means both legal and illegal.

He bypasses the establishment and joins forces with an unlikely band of renegades and outcasts to establish a hugely successful “buyers’ club” that made alternative treatments available to AIDS sufferers.

His unlikely business alliance and bond with a transsexual woman played by Oscar supporting actor front-runner Jared Leto whose character humanizes Woodroof as does his friendship with a doctor played by Jennifer Garner.

Leto is a revelation. He is unrecognizable in most scenes after losing approximately 40 pounds for the role. It’s a heartbreaking portrayal of an AIDS patient and drug addict who is dying but retains a charm and grace until the end.

The film takes you back to the mid-80s when so little was being done for AIDS sufferers and drugs such as AZT were being approved at far too slow a rate. What a horror of a time – a time that brought out the worst in some and the best in others.

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