From the start, it’s painfully clear that the filmmakers of Pain Hustlers want to approach the film’s story presuming that each of the audience members is a moralist. We are introduced to the film’s protagonist within a state of harsh judgment: She is a dancer at a nightclub, which must be an embarrassing and lonely way to provide for her daughter. At other key moments, a supporting character is revealed to be a drug addict who is also an absentee father, and of course, the entire story follows these characters down a path of self-destruction in the form of a sort of bribery empire, which means everyone here is a sucker of some sort. The only notable thing about Wells Tower’s screenplay, then, is how superficial it is.
Unless a filmmaker is particularly adept at using the simultaneously debauched or desperate elements of a story to examine whatever that story has to say, it winds up looking a lot like this movie, which simply weaves its tale without providing any solid emotional basis or sympathetic perspective. We don’t feel sorry – or much of any other emotion – for Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), the stripper-turned-criminal-entrepreneur who gets suckered into a life of wealth and status in the name of her sickly daughter Phoebe, (Chloe Coleman), and brings along her mother, Jackie (Catherine O’Hara), into the whole, sad business. We certainly don’t like Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), the pharmaceutical rep whose entire business model is corrupt to its very core.
The challenge for Tower (adapting Evan Hughes’ nonfiction account of the same name) and director David Yates is to provide some reason why we might care about the stakes involved in or the tragic consequences of Liza and Pete’s actions. We’ve seen what happens when one of the great American filmmakers took a story of a Wall Street wolf, with all its excess and lasciviousness, in the direction of accepting our fascination with it and repudiating the subject at its center. Here, it’s all about the repudiation, so that a narrative with real potential for a pulsating rhythm and unceasing momentum is stripped of its style and any notable characteristics beyond Mark Day’s montage-heavy filmmaking.
The movie also makes the fatal error of cutting away to fictionalized talking-head interviews that add nothing in terms of context and only interrupt the already wonky tone and pacing. Yates is only interested in rushing through the main bullet points of the story, in order to get to the prison sentences awaiting these individuals, as well as their eventual co-conspirator Dr. Neel (Andy García). Until then, it’s a rote and repetitive string of criminal activities that begins with bribing a bunch of doctors (Brian d’Arcy James plays the most prominent and important of them, a doctor named Lydell) to switch as many patients from one effective drug to another, thus enriching Pete’s company and employees.
In between, we get minor bits of biographical insight into these people, but crucially and fatally, Pete remains a cypher – mostly because of Evans’ coolly calculating performance, but also because the writing fails the character – and Liza’s eventual cooperation with the investigation merely comes across as a sudden and inconsistent character motivation. There is no understanding the crime at the center of Pain Hustlers, a shallow true-crime comedy struggling to bust out of the staid drama it becomes, because the movie seems hellbent on avoiding the trouble of capturing the complexity of it all.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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