A smirking (and closely fictionalized) rise-and-fall story of American greed that aspires to do for fentanyl what “The Wolf of Wall Street” did for Steve Madden, Netflix’s seriocomic “Pain Hustlers” is the primary magic and/or Tarzan-free film that “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” maestro David Yates has directed since 1998’s “The Tichborne Clarinet.” On paper, that sound like a mix of tone, subject material, and storyteller that in all probability shouldn’t work. On display screen, it completely doesn’t.
The downside with “Pain Hustlers” isn’t that its strategy to the opioid disaster feels glib (it does), or that Yates retains digitally inserting Dobby the elf into scenes of pharmaceutical gross sales reps pushing their newest medicine on morally versatile medical doctors (he doesn’t), however moderately that the film takes a golden alternative to discover the determined private selections that compounded into considered one of our most dire nationwide crises, and wastes it on the identical type of superficial crime drama that’s already been made about myriad different “victimless crimes” and get-rich-quick schemes identical to it.
Long on voiceovers, quick on specificity, and so excessive on the generic-brand Scorsese of all of it that it glosses proper over the grey areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ movie is extra targeted on being simple to swallow than it’s on meaningfully addressing the supply of the ache.
Ironically, the strongest factor about this film is the fictional character that Wells Tower’s script invented out of complete fabric in an effort to make its supply materials — Evan Hughes’ 2022 e book, “Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup” — extra digestible. A convincingly hard-nosed and tenacious Emily Blunt stars as Liza Drake, a single mother who’s struggling to make ends meet as a stripper in Florida circa 2011. It’s all unhappy lap dances and spectacularly disguising her British accent till the day a skeezy pharma gross sales rep named Pete Brenner (Chris Evans, desperately attempting to mine a three-dimensional character from a task that by no means will get extra difficult than “Boston grifter”), stumbles into her membership and provides her a job alternative in lieu of a tip.
Faster than you’ll be able to say “remember when that movie ‘Love & Other Drugs’ kinda tried this as a rom-com?,” Liza is visiting probably the most unscrupulous medical doctors within the state — personified by Brian d’Arcy James’ slimy Dr. Lydell — and prevailing upon them to prescribe Zanna Pharmaceuticals’ new marvel drug Lonafen. So far as our cash-strapped heroine is worried, her profitable new gig nearly appears like a public service: Why ought to mouth most cancers sufferers affected by super quantities of ache must suck on a slow-acting fentanyl lollipop that causes lesions after they could possibly be sublingually delivering the stuff into their bloodstream 10 occasions quicker simply by sticking it beneath their tongues? After all, billionaire Zanna CEO Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia in hushed germaphobe mode), who misplaced his personal spouse to most cancers, paid for a medical examine that instructed that the drug posed no danger of dependancy to an awesome share of sufferers.
But if creating medication is a precise science, practising it’s open to interpretation, and that’s the place the difficulty begins. Like so many companies beneath capitalism, Zanna is satisfied that it has to develop in an effort to survive; it treats most cancers with a cancerous mentality. At first, which means making a “speaker program” designed to get vulnerable medical doctors on the payroll, however greed begets extra greed, and it’s solely a matter of time earlier than Liza will get the go-ahead to start selling Lonafen for off-label makes use of. Have a headache? Try some fentanyl. Stubbed your toe? Take 10 milligrams and name again within the morning when you can nonetheless really feel your face.
On some stage, Liza is aware of that she’s breaking the regulation, however Pete likens it to driving 67 M.P.H. in a 65 M.P.H. zone. It’s a compelling analogy, and one which Liza clings to as soon as her daughter is identified with an epileptic situation which will require main (learn: expensive) mind surgical procedure. “Pain Hustlers” by no means utterly lets its heroine off the hook, however it’s clear that the American healthcare system is the true villain right here. For all its foolishness, Yates’ movie is aware of that we reside in a terminally in poor health society — a society the place the cash that individuals make is the last word painkiller that saves them from having to really feel the ill-effects firsthand.
To the restricted extent that “Pain Hustlers” works, it does so by specializing in the human side of benefiting from dependancy and distress. And to the restricted extent that it makes Liza a compelling character, it does so by specializing in her want to really feel secure — to not get wealthy, however moderately to minimize the nerve-shredding insecurity of getting to look after her daughter and her judgmental mom (a stable Catherine O’Hara, whose casting displays the film’s unrealized comedian ambitions). Those relationships aren’t poorly served by a script that shares Zanna Pharmaceuticals’ overeagerness to maintain getting larger and larger on the expense of getting something proper, however Blunt is ready to promote Liza’s self-conflicted morality simply as successfully as Liza is ready to promote Lonafen. But she finally is pressured to ask herself the identical query that so lots of her victims are by no means clear-headed sufficient to ask themselves: At what level does ache reduction begin to damage?
It’s a query that “Pain Hustlers” isn’t a lot desirous about answering, because the film would moderately trip the highs of Zanna’s preliminary success — and white-knuckle its means by way of the corporate’s reversal of fortune — than decelerate lengthy sufficient to clock what all of it means. Self-delusion turns into a relentless chorus (“I did it for the right reasons,” Liza insists throughout the hacky fake interviews that bookend the movie), and scammy posturing stands in for character progress throughout nearly each scene (“You sell what’s in your bag,” Pete gives as each a philosophy and an excuse), however all of these things is so over-the-counter that it’d as effectively be about any racket in American historical past.
Our intrinsic greed is little question a part of the purpose, however tales can solely be so “timeless” earlier than they now not change into value telling, and the repeated use of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” just isn’t, it seems, a enough stand-in for mining much less hackneyed materials from scenes of drug pushers getting their comeuppance, least of all in a movie that lacks each the abdomen to look nearer on the loss and heartache its characters left behind, and the imaginative and prescient required to dramatize how they managed to look the opposite means. “Pain Hustlers” is effectively conscious that it’s telling a story as previous as America itself, however that in the end leaves the movie with even much less of an excuse for not telling it higher.
Grade: C-
“Pain Hustlers” premiered on the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will launch it in choose theaters on Friday, October 20, earlier than making it out there to stream on Netflix beginning Friday, October 27.
