Pain Hustlers
It could be easier to write about “Pain Hustlers” if it were either really good or really bad. But no, what we have here is a tedious film by director David Yates who tries to tell a story of an ambitious single mom named Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) whose marketing tactics led to an epidemic of drug addiction. He does so by playing with formalism, using faux documentary and cranking out hedonistic scenes of excessive drug taking and partying in order to blend “Erin Brockovich” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Only there’s not enough sex in Yates’ film language, not enough excess, not enough capitalism’s depravity. It just doesn’t commit.
film start on a staged black and white documentary as a brash Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) explains his shock and disappointment that Liza would betray him. She begins as a mystery woman, an unlikely mother with a GED education who brought down an empire. When Yates switches away from the in film documentary to the semi fictional (“Pain Hustlers” is an inspired adaptation of Evan Hughes’ non-fiction work The Hard Sell), world of the picture, Liza is living in her sister’s basement with her mother (Catherine O’Hara). During the day, she takes her rebellious daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) to school; at night, she works as an exotic dancer at a strip club.
Wells Tower’s congested screenplay a work of saucy punchlines left to sour concerns itself with the desperation that drives Liza not only have they been evicted from her sister’s garage, but Phoebe suffers from seizures stemming from some lethal medical condition or other, so they move into this cheap motel where everything rattles all the time and loud sounds seem capable of summoning future episodes. She needs a break, quick. It arrives when Pete shows up at her strip club. They start talking. He likes her tenacity; she sees an easy customer. Impressed with her moxie, Pete offers Liza a job, promising to have six figures in her bank account before the end of the year. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is Pete works for a floundering pharmaceutical startup founded by Jack Neel (Andy Garcia). They sell fentanyl, a drug they promise isn’t addictive and works better and quicker than the usual pain relief provided to cancer patients. The only reason they haven’t gotten off the ground is because other pharmaceutical companies keep doctors from prescribing their medication, it’s a competitive market. Still, working on commission is better than nothing for Liza.
Blunt is the only real reason to watch “Pain Hustlers.” She gives what can best be called a game performance though poor creative decisions undermine even her work here, ill considered freeze frames crop up periodically and voiceover gets deployed when simply having Liza say something out loud would’ve sufficed. Also, as written by Tower, Liza reads as overly simplistic: Through grit alone she gets a doctor to sign out prescriptions for fentanyl (the doctor gets kickback money, the startup gets its upfront money; she’ll receive percentage points on all future sales). After getting one hooked physician to switch over to prescribing their drug exclusively, she and Peter go about paying other doctors off until company grows so rapidly that within six months Liza has risen from motel living all way up into swank condo with Phoebe attending expensive prep school downtown while back at office things are so busy not only does mom get new car but she also comes to work there too.
Liza is successful because she dedicatedly thinks that she is easing people’s suffering. In fact, it somehow relates their pain to the seizures of her daughter. This thread of connection is understood by Blunt who lets it out without directly expressing it.
Anyone else apart from Blunt overacts the dumb material. Skeevy Chris Evans from “Knives Out” worked as a subversion of his Captain America image once, but going back to the well after “The Gray Man” is too much especially when Pete is easily the weakest iteration of that character type. There are very few memorable emotions for Evans in “Pain Hustlers,” let alone admirable quips; Garcia might as well not be here; O’Hara seems stuck in quicksand; snap, chemistry, verve, whatever you want to call it, this ensemble ain’t got it.
The visual and sonic language suffers similarly. Yates attempts several Scorsese lite montages of unhinged partying and greed and opulence blurring together without ever having the panache to really stick one. We have seen Martin Scorsese do this so much better, with greater precision, with an alluring flair for the intoxicating elements of a frenzied craven environment but in Yates’ hands these same techniques and scenes of zealot capitalists cheering for cash at any cost feel desperately composed rather than uniquely edgy.
“Pain Hustlers” does better at sincerity: scenes where Liza sees old friends turned addicts off her product or when the living speak about loved ones lost to overdose allow some true empathetic footing to emerge from under the movie. But there are not enough such scenes, Yates seems caught between wanting to critique this startup’s inhumanity and wanting to revel in its gaudiness.
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