Crisis
With “Crisis,” writer-director Nicholas Jarecki is trying to do for the opioid crisis what Steven Soderbergh did with his 2000 examination on multiple fronts of the War on Drugs. “Crisis” is not as sprawling, and it doesn’t try to be, but it’s compelling and tense when it wants to be as our three main characters find themselves against different levels of adversity. The title cards about what the current reality of the opioid crisis is are unnecessary; “Crisis” has laid out the human toll of it cleanly, and in a way that makes the corruption at the heart of it palpable.
The film begins along the Canadian border, as a drug mule is captured in a desolate area of the border. The mule works as part of the drug operation DEA agent Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer) is working with a group of Armenians, all at the direction of “Mother.” Kelly is trying to cut through the agency’s bureaucracy to keep his operation a secret from his partners, but one of his superiors (Michelle Rodriguez) is skeptical about the way the operation is being run- she’s concerned because it involves feeding the addictions of high-risk opioid users. That’s not all Kelly has to worry about; his sister (Indira Varma) is in a rehab center for opioid addiction, and her treatment is struggling. Someone who seems to be doing better with her addiction is Claire Reimann (Evangeline Lilly)- we first see her in an NA meeting, and then meeting her son to discuss dinner plans. The third main character is Dr. Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman), a University professor who is running tests on a new painkiller that the company funding it claims will not have the addictive strength of opioids. Human trials are promising, but Dr. Brower’s lab is getting distressing results with its tests on mice; you can probably figure out how that is going to go over with the company hoping to get it passed by the FDA.
All of the moving pieces of “Crisis’s” script move along in ways that we can, perhaps, see coming from a mile away, but there are some turns in the narrative we might not expect right off the bat. Jarecki’s film is a bit predictable, but it’s always interesting because of the way he’s layered the elements of the story, and made each of the central characters compelling. A big part of that is the personalities we know from other films for Oldman, Hammer and Lilly. Oldman is so well-established as a character actor whose characters have to operate in gray areas that revelations about Brower’s past discretions are accepted because of the way Oldman is capable of selling them to an audience. Like Oldman, Hammer is someone whose reputation is filled with unsettling information, but it’s the complicated nature of his past characters that allow us to accept both the determined DEA agent and brother, as well as someone who will work outside the system to try and get results. Lilly is a bit of a wild card compared to those two, but we accept the struggle to stay clean we see on her face, as well as the ways she will do anything for her son, even if it compromises her safety along the way. All three kept me interested every step of the way, and help “Crisis” land its punches more than it might otherwise.
Great review! Look forward to seeing Crisis.