“Sell me this pen,” a line spoken with eerie undertones at the end of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) punctuates the sad dynamic between the unsuspecting buyer and the unrelenting seller. The line speaks not just to skeezy figures like Jordan Belfort but also to the constant convictions of salespeople like Belfort. People with savvy enough tongues—and a lack of conscience to boot—can weaponize their skills into selling more than style and comfort, becoming a twisted, self-deluded representation of American exceptionalism.
This self-serving exceptionalism leads directly to David Yates’s comic docudrama, Pain Hustlers (2023), in which desperate (albeit pathetic) people use their skills to push a fentanyl-laced cancer drug to unsuspecting patients in Florida.
The film is based on a true story adapted from Evan Hughes’ New York Times Magazine article “The Pain Hustlers” from 2018. Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower chronicle the failing startup led by a germaphobe billionaire investor, Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia), and a sleazy pharma sales rep, Pete Brenner (Chris Evans). Together, they try to conscript a doctor to push Lonafin, their spray-deliverable drug, over their competitors. Their fortunes change for the better, though, when they happen upon the salesperson of their dreams.
In actuality, Pain Hustlers centers on Emily Blunt’s Liza Drake, a single mother who is down on her financial luck. When she’s not working at a strip club in the daytime, she takes care of her daughter, Phoebe (Chloe Coleman), while couch-hopping from her sister’s garage to low-rent motels. She meets Pete at the strip club, and her lovely charisma compels Pete to offer her a job as a sales rep so that she can rake in the big bucks through commission sales.
Liza buys the billionaire’s sad story of losing his wife to cancer, and she believes this drug is the best of the best even after she sees Pete fabricate her resume with ridiculous lies about her pharmaceutical experience. She has an empathetic heart for people less fortunate–in Liza’s eyes, she’s the perfect sales rep.
After numerous failed attempts at trying to woo doctors to prescribe Lonafin, Liza finds success in a sad strip mall doctor named Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James). Through quick edits and montage reels of partying and cash-spending, the startup becomes the top dog in the market.
Now, the company has to force growth by hosting “speaker engagements,” where sales reps bribe doctors to push their cancer drug to non-cancer patients, which quickly leads to addictions and death. This darkness puts a damp cloud over Liza’s cash-flush life, where she now has her own house and her eccentric mother, Jackie (Catherine O’Hara), has a job as a sales rep. As the death toll mounts and federal agencies start to take interest in the company’s exponential growth, Liza can’t help but feel the house of pharma-cards beginning to crumble.
Going back to Scorsese’s 2013 black comedy, it’s clear Yates yearns to lace the wild eccentric nature of that black comedy into this pharmaceutical satire. However, his film has no interiority or conviction to focus on a singular perspective. Pete and the extravagant lifestyle that’s borne from Liza’s success are meant to emulate the debauchery of Scorsese, yet Yates merely tips his toe in that mucky pond. He wants to make an entertaining film about a serious subject, such as twisted pharmaceutical practices, but his direction lacks any significant bite or substance.
We see montages of partying intercut with Liza’s internal dissonance, but all of this feels unearned and contrived, as if Yates is following the beats of a Scorsese tragedy rather than forming his own path. The movie uses a black-and-white framing device of interviews with its central characters reflecting on the events of the film, but it all feels lackluster in style and narrative. It doesn’t help that similar drama miniseries, such as Dopesick (2021) or Netflix’s own Painkiller (2023), have tackled the opiate crisis with far more depth and research. Pain Hustlers thus feels like an afterthought in having anything serious to say, other than shady startups are bad and moral conscience is good.
It’s especially disappointing seeing Emily Blunt’s role be written so sloppily despite having great potential for moral complexity; it’s a testament to Blunt’s acting prowess that the film manages to be watchable. Her charming persona allows Liza to feel more dimensional than the typical story beats she’s forced to walk through. As Liza slowly succumbs to the successful and wealthy lifestyle of an exploitative sales rep, Blunt’s doe-eyed, innocent reactions showcase a slow turn in the character’s attitude, behavior, and sense of perspective.
Sadly, no one else rises to Blunt’s talents. Chris Evans continues to shed the good-guy, All-American-solider heroics of Captain America as he yells obscenities, gross metaphors, and apathy through a cartoonish Boston accent. Evans showed considerable villainous complexity in Knives Out (2019), but it seems that no one other than Rian Johnson can write an equally measurable gray character that skirts the line between dickish and degenerate.
It’s admirable of Yates to switch his trajectory from directing $200 million Harry Potter movies into something more vivid and small, a film that looks to be grimy and grim but sadly retains the same “safe” sensibilities of his blockbuster days. Perhaps the destructively self-interested territory of American infrastructure is too toxic for the wholesome toes of David Yates, as his film feels hollow and void of tangible substance. Maybe he should shed some of his happy-go-lucky tendencies before he’s convinced he can have a point of view on heavy topics that don’t involve boy wizards or wands.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Netflix
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