Painkiller

An editing nightmare but also incredibly important. I read the book Dopesick a year ago or so, but I (regrettably) haven’t seen the Hulu show. First reading the true stories surrounding the early days of the opioid epidemic was a powerful and informative and devastating and raw experience. The show attempted to cover these same storylines, but shifted and dramatized them just like any other based-on-a-true-story narrative piece. The pacing of each episode pivoted on our central character Edie, recounting the late 90s OxyContin boom in an interview voiceover format. This section of the piece relied heavily on Uzo Aduba’s incredible performance and turned out to be my favorite part. Then, as each successive storyline fleshed out in jarring incessant flashes, I just kept going back and reminding myself of the riveting non-fiction book I read. Dopesick (the book) is the masterpiece here. I don’t really know what Painkiller is trying to do. See, the filmmakers seem to mistrust in me as an audience member. Maybe it’s a problem with streaming or tiktok or something outside of the filmmaker’s control, but I actually do not need to be reminded every 2.5 seconds about what happened in the prior scenes leading up to this moment. I’m not kidding here. For some reason, someone in post seems to think that I have the memory of a goldfish. Can I just watch the performances and get lost in the story? Is that too much to ask? I prefer to make the connections to previous scenes on my own, and I prefer to watch a story unfold before me. They don’t have to chop it up into tiktok react bits just to keep me interested. But aside from my qualms, the importance of this story surmounts any criticism I have as an actor/filmmaker myself. Painkiller deserves to be made. The acting, although ostentatious at times, never strays too far into caricature and keeps the story moving. I have to remind myself (and everyone else) that there is an audience of people who won’t otherwise read the book or watch the Hulu show, and they need to know about this just as much as anyone else. EDIT: For some reason, I was thinking about this show again, and then I remembered that in the world of the story, Richard Sackler is doing all of these bad things because he’s trying to impress the ghost of his dead granddaddy. Like wtf. Such an unneeded and unrealistic “humanization” (if I even can say it that way) reinterpretation of what we all know was actually the all too common capitalist ailment money blindness. Really wishing I hadn’t let my artsy fartsy, “all art is necessary” side of myself through so much in my initial review. This show was both forgettable and also definitely unnecessary. It’s really giving Netflix execs scrambling after Hulu (or whoever produced Dopesick) picked up the rights to that story. Money, money, money. Ugh.