‘American Pain’ Review: A Gripping Documentary Portrait of Twin Kings of the Pill Mill Hill
variety.comDennis Harvey Film CriticThough it’s been consistently overshadowed by more dramatic breaking news stories, few issues have dealt 21st-century U.S.
society such a crippling blow as the opioid crisis. There have been documentaries about afflicted communities, irresponsible pharmaceutical manufacturers and misguided or corrupt prescribing physicians, as well as fictive depictions and bestselling print exposés like Patrick Redden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.” But it’s hard to think of a prior chronicle quite so luridly indicting as “American Pain.”A serious muckrake after the relatively softball exercise of 2018 crowdpleaser “Science Fair” (which was co-directed with Cristina Costantini), Darren Foster’s second feature draws on his long-term opioid-related TV reporting to paint a particularly horrible kind of all-American success story.
Its principal figures are twin South Florida brothers whose ruthless exploitation of weak regulation and an addiction epidemic made them, for a time, the nation’s single largest “pill mill.” Complete with stripper girlfriends, tank-sized SUVs and other juvenile-fantasy accoutrements of “living large” on other people’s suffering, this is a garishly compelling tale whose protagonists remain — even after lengthy prison sentences — stubbornly unapologetic.
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