Writer/director Bryan Greenberg clearly has noble intentions with Junction, which wants to be a sprawling ensemble drama about the opioid crisis plaguing America’s pharmaceutical industry. At the top, there are the executives looking to cash in on any new drug that crosses their paths, and at the bottom, there are the hapless victims of this omnipresent scheme, which weaponizes the “approval” of the United States Food and Drug Administration to target consumers whose pain, often following surgery or an injury of some sort, might translate to a lot of dollar bills for manufacturers. Such an obvious point is about as deep as Greenberg gets across the span of the stories in his screenplay, unfortunately.
It surely doesn’t help that we have seen interlocking dramas like this one before, approached and executed with greater care and far less emphasis on false drama and sudden “twists” that simply feel manufactured for shock value. One’s focus should, of course, be upon how this particular effort manages to juggle its many characters and storylines, and that’s where Greenberg’s ambition reveals itself to be mostly surface-deep. There is a difference between establishing a lot of storylines, each wishing to tackle a serious topic, and then either coasting on that promise or actually saying something about the characters and events within those storylines.
This difference is at its clearest when we reach the biggest twist involving how Michael, the character played by Greenberg, connects to the wider story being told through the microcosm of each smaller vignette. It is a little bit of a shock, in that the movie doesn’t hint at anything regarding this connection until the moment it is revealed, but it registers far more strongly as a flagrantly manipulative bit of cheating in terms of its storytelling. We already might have cared about Michael, a father separated from his wife Allison (Sophia Bush) on account of his addiction to a prescription painkiller, because Greenberg’s performance is by far the film’s biggest asset.
Elsewhere, Griffin Dunne plays the CEO of a pharmaceutical company on the verge of a major legislative win, and Ryan Eggold appears as a major political player vying for control of the company. They also happen to be a father-and-son pair, which really drives home the point that everyone is corrupt in the upper echelon of this business. Also, Ashley Madekwe plays a gynecologist whose financial situation has prompted a career switch-up toward pain management, in a way completing the circle of all those who might be involved in transactions that lead to the sale and distribution of oxycodone, which is the pill of choice for Michael and so many others cursed by this crisis.
Greenberg practically fills the cast at the sidelines with recognizable faces, with the most memorable saved for Jamie Chung (the director’s real-life partner) as a prospective patient of Mary’s and, briefly, Dash Mihok as a man who survived his addiction and has some choice words (at exactly the right moment, of course) for Dunne’s heartless executive. There are singular powerful moments, as when a text full of meaning is narrated over a montage showing how fatally pointless it has suddenly become. Junction tackles a worthy subject, but storytelling requires more than simplistic nobility and the tone of an “Afterschool Special.”
Photo courtesy of VMI Worldwide
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