This article contains spoilers for the film Pain Hustlers.
Inspired by a 2018 New York Times Magazine article penned by journalist Evan Hughes, Pain Hustlers, directed by David Yates,(Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts, The Legend of Tarzan), offers a dramatization of the rise and fall of a small opioid firm bribing doctors into prescribing a cancer pain medication that contained the highly addictive substance fentanyl.
Loosely based on true events, the story follows Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mother bouncing between odd jobs to make ends meet. We first see her clocking in for a shift at a grungy strip club kept afloat by a revolving door of second-rate clientele.
It’s here she encounters the smooth talking Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a pharmaceutical rep at a dodgy and dying firm named Zanna.
Brenner is sleezy but blessed with the gift of the gab and Drake is as sharp as she is desperate to make money. So, she humours a slurring Brenner until he drunkenly offers her a job as a low-level rep at Zanna.
That night, Drake returns home to her unruly teenage daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). They share a makeshift apartment inside a garage with Drake’s offbeat, deadbeat mother, Jackie (Catherine O’Hara).
Drake is swiftly kicked out after she fails to pay rent, so, in a precise and slightly ominous foreshadowing of things to come, she and Phoebe move to a crumbling roadside apartment complex occupied by an ostracized community of working class families.
Determined to turn her life around, Drake strolls boldly into Zanna to take Brenner up on his offer.
What ensues is a rags to riches story captured through a tired lens. Stylistically mimetic of The Wolf of Wall Street, which brought the unworn novelty of unbridled filth and excess to the screen, Pain Hustlers arguably sets out to achieve something equally as thrilling, but in an era where feral partying, widespread corporate greed, and institutionalized corruption are news to no one.
Consequently, Pain Hustlers is always edging towards but never quite hitting the mark. What could have been a gut-wrenching and nuanced portrayal of the origins of the opioid crisis instead clutches at its least interesting parts.
Nonetheless, offhanded voiceovers intercut throughout the film make for amusing and revealing insights into the minds of Drake and Brenner, as do black-and-white documentary-style interviews given by multiple characters, who are presumably talking to a fictionalized Evan Hughes, though it is not entirely clear.
However, Blunt and Evans bring brilliant performances, their chemistry is palatable to such a degree that despite their characters’ mounting improprieties, at times it is possible to root in their favour.
Nonetheless, the elements of the story that could have made the film pop feel half-baked and lazily woven into the action. For example, the unpacking of Drake’s strained relationship with her mother, whom she hires as a drug rep in the midst of Zanna’s ascendancy, is awarded just one, albeit finely executed, meaningful discussion.
Similarly, Phoebe is diagnosed with an illness that requires her to undergo an expensive and traumatic surgery. While the twist certainly adds shades of gray to an otherwise defined ethical line, it falls short in its objective to obscure moral boundaries and humanize it’s anti-hero.
The film takes some bizarre and mildly humorous turns, for example when the owner of Zanna, Jack Neel (Andy Garcia) achieves billionaire status he inherits a roster of increasingly odd possessions and characteristics, including an obsession with his employees taking off their shoes in the office, and a pet dog that is always accompanied by an identical but slightly smaller toy version of itself.
Ultimately, Blunt shoulders Pain Hustlers, a clunky, sometimes fun, two-hour overture to a sprawling tale that never gets told. But through all its misfirings, she indisputably shines.
