Ain't Nothing Can Kill Me In 30 Days

...sometimes a great protagonist needs an even greater adversity to emerge. As a passive viewer, it can be especially satisfying to see a person who starts with almost no redeeming qualities reinvent themselves as a champion of the downtrodden. At present, superheroes are guaranteed paydays at the movies and this is with good reason. Even in the best of times, many of us want to see someone with great ability use it to thwart chaos. As we have been wallowed in much collective worry in the past number of years, superheroes play a vital role in imagining what can be instead of what happens to be. 

Ron Woodruff had no superpowers. From the opening scene of Dallas Buyers Club, it was evident that Ron Woodruff barely had any powers at all. His frame was as riddled with malnutrition as one could probably be before turning sideways and becoming invisible. His use of drugs was as open and unflinching as a Wal-Mart shopper in sweatpants. When Ron Woodruff spoke, he never gave a first thought to seeing who might be around before firing off a round of racist, sexist and homophobic slurs. Sometimes all in one sentence. Ron Woodruff, with his complete lack of concern even for himself, did not even have the makeup of a low level villain. 

Dallas Buyers Club does not bother to carry the viewer to any great emotional reveal of Ron Woodruff having contracted HIV. It comes to you with as little dramatic flair or shock as it does to him. I suspect that this manner of learning of Ron Woodruff's fate is as anticlimactic as it would be if it were any nameless face that has come and gone before. Maybe the intent was to remind those of us who have not been inflicted that the countless victims of the disease received no fanfare of their own. The mood of the scene was created to remind us how utterly alone it would feel to learn of one's fate. In its complete lack of overly dramatic reveal, you cannot help but be drawn into Ron Woodruff's story.

Ron Woodruff was the polar opposite of extraordinary when we first meet him. With knowledge of his fate almost to the day, he could have used his final days to rot in his trailer park home indulging in his daily vices. For most people, no one would blame a person stricken with a deadly virus for using their remaining days to extract whatever enjoyment possible with the clock ticking down. Instead, Ron Woodruff uses his own prior self-centered worldview to try and defeat his own fate.

Through the course of Dallas Buyers Club, you witness Ron Woodruff fight tooth and nail for his own life. As an addict and compulsive gambler, he uses his cunning in these seedy areas to find any means necessary to fight for his own life. Through illegal obtaining of experimental drugs to crossing borders with unapproved substances, Ron Woodruff's steely eyed focus remains on staying alive. With his sketchy means of making money under the table, he makes the unlikeliest of allies with a banned doctor in Mexico and a transgender he met in the hospital to launch his black market supplement club. Essentially, he uses a combination of his own seedy experiences with his renewed desire to beat the odds to pull the compassionate version out of himself kicking and screaming.

Lasting wealth with deeper meaning and sustainability always grows from the bottom up. Ron Woodruff partners with a person whom he once would have despised and gains something greater than short term material gain. For one, he uses borrowed time to constantly research every possible angle on the planet to manage what is killing him and develops it into compassion for others suffering. Through being rejected by those he once called friends, he begins to see what it feels like for those forced to the fringes of society to live as an outcast.

Matthew McConaughey really brings Rob Woodruff to life in this role. The accolades he is currently receiving for this are well deserved and likely to net him the ultimate prize. In a interesting way, he uses this role to get under the fingernails of a time of an epidemic and in a place that often gets derided in the mainstream for its hostility and dismissive attitude towards homosexuality. In a roundabout way, it shows that all types of people can come from all types of places while putting oneself into another's shoes can go miles in developing empathy for others.