Edie Flowers investigated Purdue Pharma for a long time but ran into a wall erected by the lawyers and above all by the powerful contacts of the company responsible for the painkiller OxyContin. Now she is asked to collaborate on a new investigation, which points directly to the tycoon Richard Sackler, and Edie thus tells her story, which intersects with that of a young Purdue representative, Shannon Schaeffer. Ensnared by the easy money that Britt Hufford promises her, Shannon enters the world of Purdue and soon earns her share, but she becomes increasingly scarred by the effects of the drug she is pushing onto the market. Meanwhile, mechanic Glen Kryger, the victim of a back injury, is treated with OxyContin and ends up becoming addicted to it, ruining his life and that of his family.
The rise and fall of OxyContin and the Big Pharma that spread it are at the center of a new miniseries that adds nothing new to works like Dopesick and indeed pushes the j’accuse pedal as if it were dealing with a scandal to be denounced with urgency.
Peter Berg’s miniseries Painkiller therefore arrives quite late on the facts and also on other titles that have dealt with the issue. In itself it would not be a great fault but his aggressive tone seems to be the result of a misunderstanding, as if the issue were a revelation to be shouted at the top of one’s lungs when in fact it is now well known even outside the States.
Furthermore, it stops exactly where Dopesick stopped, without therefore addressing how the “crisis” of opioid drugs had a whole series of phases following that of OxyContin and is now, for example, dominated by the spread of the deadly Fentanyl. Unlike Dopesick, however, she spares us at least an ending with triumphantly out-of-place tones and she instead remains bitter despite the defeat in court – and above all in the eyes of public opinion – of Richard Sackler.
Berg chooses an aggressive and at the same time didactic register, with the character of Uzo Aduba who has the thankless task of summarizing the whole story and providing clarifications of all sorts, appearing humanly crushed by his own words.
We are in the area of Adam McKay’s films such as The Big Short and Vice, in particular in the editing with inserts of archive material, as well as in a grotesque and caricatural interpretation of the characters of the Sackler family. Above all, the very agitated and paranoid Mortimer, who screams in terror in every situation, and the almost autistic Richard, played by Matthew Broderick in a very unusual role for him. He wanders around a huge, deserted house, worried about his dog and the fire alarm that sounds inappropriately, not letting him sleep, and is also haunted by the ghost of Arthur Sackler Sr., who has the face of Clark Gregg with a showy wig. The founder of the company’s success continually reminds him that he must not give in to the law, but at the same time tells him that, with OxyContin, he has gone too far and risks destroying the immortal fame he has tried to bring to the family through philanthropy and patronage .