Netflix movie tries, but there’s no laughing away the pain
There’s no way to make a jolly romp out of the opioid crisis. This would seem obvious, but not so obvious that people don’t keep trying.
Money, drugs, sex and lots of death — these stock elements of popular entertainment come built into the story. But the dramatic challenge is this: It’s not one tragedy, but many. If you zoom in on one victim’s story, you’ve just told one story. But if you zoom out to get the big picture, then you’re suddenly doing a film about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. You’re not presenting a tragedy anymore, but something scandalous and salacious, involving corruption and greed.
So any filmmaker has a choice. Do they try to depict a tragedy that can’t fully be told, or a business scandal that’s fun to present? In “The Pain Hustlers,” they do what anyone might do. They make a movie that’s an irreverent, entertaining account of the corruption, then double back halfway in to say, “Oh, yeah, and a lot of people died because of this.”
The problem is that that can’t work. The romp element can’t delight in a cinematic universe where huge numbers of people are dying off camera. At the same time, the tragedy can’t be felt or appropriately acknowledged in a relatively lighthearted context. By now it seems quite possible that the opioid crisis eludes dramatization.
Still, “Pain Hustlers” is fun for a while. Chris Evans, as a hotshot salesman for a struggling pharmaceutical company, walks into a strip club and starts talking to one of the dancers, Liza (Emily Blunt), a single mom. He gets drunk and offers her a job as a sales rep for a new cancer drug. The drug, which contains fentanyl, relieves pain in terminal patients.
In the beginning, “Pain Hustlers” takes the form of a rags-to-riches story. Liza has no money or hope, and by a twist of fate, she finds herself in a lucrative job to which she is well suited. She turns out to be better at selling pain medication than her colleagues. Soon, she is on track to making $600,000 a year, with stock options worth up to $10 million.
Do you see how this might seem like a happy story? I’m sure director David Yates would say, well, it’s supposed to seem happy in the beginning, but then things shift. But they don’t really shift. Blunt is a sensitive, feelingful presence onscreen, and it’s impossible not to care about her. And the movie stays with her, tracing her growing disillusionment, as well as her growing fear of ending up in prison.
Basically, the movie is only tangentially about the opioid crisis. It’s really about Liza. But considering the staggering calamity of the crisis, this feels out of proportion. Imagine a movie set in the time of the Holocaust that focuses on the ups and downs of a young executive working at IG Farben. You could make that story, but it would be missing the larger point.
Add in the fact that Liza is a fictional character, and that virtually every character in the film is either completely fictional or a composite, and you have a movie that reeks of pointlessness — and this is even before the whole thing starts dragging after about an hour.
Still, Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of “Pain Hustlers” watchable.