Pain Hustlers review: Big pharma satire is a hard pill to swallow
Emily Blunt dazzles, but the rest of this ripped-from-the-headlines dramedy misses the mark
Film Reviews Pain Hustlers
It’s been a long 13 years since Love & Other Drugs made Jake Gyllenhaal’s pharma rep the lovable half of a teary rom-com couple. These days, such characters are more likely to be found in a film like Pain Hustlers, a satire that wants to serve as a righteous indictment of a pharmaceutical industry that’s long put profits over patient’s health and well-being. But in trying to give us a portrait of money-driven reps eager to cross ethical and legal lines to pad their pockets and those of their bosses, Harry Potter director David Yates reduces his protagonist to a familiar heroine we’re expected to understand, and even root for.
Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a single mother whose world turns upside down when, while working at a strip joint, she meets smarmy pharma rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans). Pete’s in dire need of better marketing for the fast-acting fentanyl-based drug Lonafin, something the charming and desperate Liza is all too happy to help him with. After all, if she doesn’t, she’ll lose the chance to finally do right by her daughter. And as a scene early in the film shows us, nothing motivates Liza as much as the need to protect her daughter, Phoebe (Chloe Coleman): When the teenager is nearly expelled from school for starting a fire, Liza manages to negotiate her punishment to a manageable three-day suspension. Her charm knows no bounds; she’s a perfect salesperson, and a perfect match for Pete, who’s all too happy to rewrite her resume so she gets hired.
At a time when films like Ben Is Back and All The Beauty And The Bloodshed–not to mention TV shows like Dopesick and Netflix’s own Painkiller–are forcing audiences to see the opioid crisis as a wake-up call to the greed that drives the American health care industry, Pain Hustlers opts to provide a more colorful (read: funnier) take on this issue. Tone-wise, it wants to stand alongside films like The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Big Short, and Dumb Money (not to mention Hustlers). The story of Liza Drake, set as it is against corporate greed and craven racketeering schemes, is pitched as a wholly American one, as farcical as it is tragic. Desperation, as Pete’s kooky boss Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia) tells Liza at one point, is a hell of a motivator, one meant to push you to do the unthinkable. Sure, Liza’s motivations may be well-intentioned (she wants to care for her daughter and cover her ever-increasing medical expenses) but that plot device has the undue effect of flagrantly short-circuiting our sympathies.
By the time Liza is knowingly bribing doctors and turning a blind eye toward the push to foist Lonafin on non-cancer patients, Pain Hustlers turns into a portrait of a mother at her wits’ end who must stand for something lest she lose the family she was so eager to support. Screenwriter Wells Tower, working from Evan Hughes’ book The Hard Sell: Crime And Punishment At An Opioid Startup, wants Liza to stand in as a compromised figure with murky ethical motivations. But needing to follow a protagonist whose sympathies the film can leverage at any point blunts whatever judgment it wants to cast on its characters—and the broader history it’s trying to depict.
Similarly, the push to frame Liza’s role in the rise and fall of Lonafin within the confines of a quippy satire—with the likes of Catherine O’Hara (playing Liza’s mother, Jackie) and Andy Garcia infusing their characters with funky quirks—means it’s never biting enough to capture the world it wants to depict. This is nowhere more obvious than in its flimsy docuseries framing device where Liza, Pete, and Jackie give us an expository-heavy backstory meant to help speed the story along. The device, especially when presented on Netflix alongside so many ripped-from-the-headlines docuseries, has the unfortunate effect of feeling like a narrative stopgap designed solely for cheap gags (like Jackie complaining about the size of Liza’s head when she was born) and little else.
At the center of all this is a luminous performance by Emily Blunt. The actress—who is equally at home in big spectacle musicals, thrilling blockbusters, grounded horror tales, character-driven dramas, and indie comedies—is able to walk the fine line that Pain Hustlers demands of her. The wry world-weariness of Liza at the start of the film slowly gives way to a winning demeanor that soon begins to crack once the enormity of what she’s wrought on patients dawns on her. Against the more broad caricatures of Evans, Garcia, and even O’Hara, Blunt’s Liza is a revelation; she’s the emotional and moral anchor of the story.
It’s a pity she has to shoulder so much of the film’s wild tonal shifts. While it’s wildly entertaining to watch a performer walk such a tightrope, at some point you lament that the opioid crisis has been reduced to a circus sideshow.
Pain Hustlers is in select theaters now and arrives on Netflix on October 27
15 Comments
I haven’t read The Hard Sell, but it seems like Evans’ and Blunt’s characters are based on Alec Burlakoff and Sunrise Lee, who also figure prominently in HBO’s documentary Crime of the Century. If so, then I admire the balls of whoever decided to go ahead with Pain Hustlers as a satirical/funny take on the opioid crisis, because Burklakoff and Lee are abhorrent people. Alec Burlakoff is one of the scariest figures, in my opinion, in Crime of the Century. He’s a a psychopath who pushed a drug he knew killed people in order to get very, very rich. He’s all manipulation for personal gain. And Sunrise Lee was right there alongside him, helping get people hooked and living large while people died. They’re both abhorrent people who got off far too lightly for their crimes (Burlakoff received a 26 month sentence and is already out and billing himself as a “sales coach and motivational speaker” while Lee got just a year). Anyway, I think (hope) Hollywood will catch on that if you’re going to satirize a continuing crises that has killed 750,000+ people in the US, you better nail it. Satire is a very tricky thing to pull of, so many let this topic rest for a while before trying. For anyone interested in better takes on the opioid industry, Crime of the Century is excellent, as is Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain. Hulu’s Dopesick miniseries is probably the best of the bunch for fictionalizations, but it’s just OK.
I recently finished a novel that includes elements of the origins of the opioid crisis (Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver) that talks about how salespeople were able to flood the market by essentially bribing small-town doctors who weren’t making very much money providing ordinary medical care. I’ve always known they were overprescribed but that much of the issue was out of ignorance of their addictiveness. That may have been true in some cases, but as it became evident that Oxy and the like are insanely addictive there were too many people making too much money pushing it. And it wasn’t just the people in Appalachia were bored and decided to start doing heavy drugs, their geographies were targeted.
Yes. Empire of Pain and Dopesick (the book and the series) make it very clear that certain regions were targeted because they were ripe for exploitation. ETA: Did you like Demon Copperhead? It’s been on my to-read list for a while now. I should pick it up.
I did like it, but there are parts that are a tough read. Obviously it’s a parallel of David Copperfield, so it’s not going to be rainbows and unicorns. Worth the time, though – it’s not terribly long or dense.
Bribing small-town doctors is a major plot point in Pain Hustlers.
I feel like i’ve seen this story too much recently, so I think I’ll pass (hell, even House of Usher was about a family pushing their version of Oxy!).
lol I don’t know why House of Usher thought that was necessary. having that much wealth is evil, we don’t need a whole big pharm narrative.
It was a choice, I believe, to enhance the idea of the Deal With The Devil, regardless of consequences towards others.
I feel like someone along the lines of Bobcat Goldthwait or Harmony Korine would be up to the task of delivering a real hard to watch satire of the opioid crisis and pharma profiteering. If you have to pick from Harry Potter directors then you gotta go with Alfonso Cuaron.
But needing to follow a protagonist whose sympathies the film can leverage at any point blunts whatever judgment it wants to cast on its characters—and the broader history it’s trying to depict.I see what you did there.
“Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a single mother whose world turns upside down when, while working at a strip joint, she meets smarmy pharma rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans). Pete’s in dire need of better marketing for the fast-acting fentanyl-based drug Lonafin, something the charming and desperate Liza is all too happy to help him with.” I’m sorry, there’s a narrative leap here that this review does not explain. He gets a dancer/shot girl/bartender yadda yadda yadda better marketing?
I love all of the people who will tell you “The Pharma industry is bad and puts profits over people” and will then tell you in the same breath “You need to get vaccinated, boosted, and boosted again because the Pharma companies want what’s best for the public.” Makes great sense.
No one except idiots are saying the pharma companies want what’s best for the public. The pharma industry is bad but it’s also good to be vaccinated if you give half a shit about the people around you.
Oh bullshit. People were walking around in Pfizer t-shirts promoting the fact that they got “the jab.” But again, Pharma companies are evil unless it’s for a vaccine that is somehow produced in record time and the public is forced to get it. Then they become beacons of light for mankind. Give me a break.
I watched this on the strength of Wells Tower’s name alone, off his excellent story collection and even-better nonfiction essays. It’s nice to see him still working, but C is the correct grade: it’s so-so. Blunt does very well, and there are some good scenes, but it’s far too pat and histrionic to be narratively interesting. It actually seems less believable than straight fiction: Andy Garcia’s character, for one, is off-putting in an unwitting way, a character that couldn’t be less real.