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A few months ago I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard's film of J.D. Vance's memoir of growing
up poor in Kentucky and Ohio. I was kinder to it than most critics, but—being human—I probably would have been less kind if I had known then of Vance's remaking
of himself into a Trumpite senatorial candidate. My point here, however, is that I thought Howard's film worked well as the story of a dysfunctional family, but not as a
consideration of rural or small-town poverty. To have accomplished the latter, I said, he would have had to make a documentary or a miniseries.
Since then, HBOMax has released a documentary. Alex Gibney's The Crime of the Century, and a miniseries, Craig Zobel's Mare of Easttown, that
suggest what Hillbilly Elegy might have been. Neither is cheerful viewing, but both are superb. The Crime of the Century will enrage you; Mare of
Easttown will fascinate and move you, and has a final message of hope that feels entirely earned.
The Crime of the Century—co-produced by the Washington Post, which published the original stories on which the film is
based--begins grimly, with emergency medical technicians responding to a young man's death by opioid overdose. Gibney then switches to a series of billboards and road signs
that convey the film's message. More than 500,000 people have died of opioid overdoses since 2000, the signs tell us. "But a crisis is not something that just
happens," they say. "What if, behind the crisis, there was a spectacular crime?"
Gibney spends the next four hours delineating that crime as a conspiracy between drug cartels, greedy pharmaceutical companies, and corrupt
doctors and government officials. He divides the documentary into two parts—the first covering the Sackler family, owners of Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, and
the second considering pharmaceutical investor John Kapoor, former CEO of fentanyl manufacturer Insys Therapeutics.
He also calls on a formidable group of witnesses, including investigative reporters Scott Higham, Sari Hurwitz, Patrick Radden Keefe and Barry
Meier; Joseph Rannazzisi, a former Drug Enforcement Agency official who came to grief with his superiors over his zealous pursuit of drug company executives; Art Van Zee, a family
doctor in southwest Virginia who led a one-man war against opioid addiction; and Alec Burlakoff, former vice president of sales operations for Insys, who tells how he made
Subsys—a spray fentanyl 100 times more addictive than heroin—a must-have for pain patients across the U.S.
Members of the Sackler family declined to be interviewed for the film,
which was a smart move on their part. As Gibney and his witnesses tell us, the Sackler brothers—Raymond, Mortimer, and especially eldest brother
Arthur—created the business model that ended up killing hundreds of thousands. In the early 1950s the brothers, all medical doctors, purchased
a small pharmaceutical company, Purdue Frederick, and a small medical advertising firm, McAdams. Arthur Sackler, according to Keefe,
transformed the landscape of how drugs are sold—and not for the good. Shamelessly he advertised products such as Librium and Valium using
endorsements from doctors who turned out not to exist. "Sackler," Keefe tells us, "crossed the line from promotion to fraud."
Arthur Sackler died before Oxycontin was introduced, but his nephew
Richard carried on the family tradition, according to the film. When Oxycontin was submitted for Food and Drug Administration approval in
1994, Richard Sackler and his staff found a friendly FDA official, Curtis Wright, who orchestrated Oxycontin's approval as a non-addictive drug
despite a total lack of data. Then, Gibney tells us, Wright joined Purdue as an executive.
Oxycontin, like fentanyl, was designed as a pain medication for terminal cancer patients, but the witnesses note that market is too small to
guarantee a profit. Purdue salesmen pitched Oxycontin to doctors as a treatment for common chronic pain, and by 2000 Oxycontin sales topped
$1 billion a year. They invented a term—"pseudoaddiction"—to account for the behavior of Oxycontin users who showed signs of addiction. The
treatment for pseudoaddiction was to increase the dose.
All of this provided a template for Kapoor and Burlakoff when they marketed Subsys. According to Burlakoff, he always zeroed in on the
doctors who treated their practices as businesses and their patients as customers, and he plied those doctors with junkets and expensive gifts.
Doctors who couldn't be enticed into prescribing opioids were shamed into it, according to Dr. Anna Lembke of the Stanford University School of
Medicine. "(You were told that) if you don't use this, you are a bad doctor," Lembke said. "You want your patients to suffer!"
And then the illegal opioid trade began…
The Crime of the Century is dense with medical history, legal and political
skullduggery, and heartbreaking personal stories—far too much to recount here. But the film will keep you both enthralled and infuriated throughout
all four of its hours. At least Kapoor and Burlakoff are in jail. But Purdue paid only chump change in fines; no Purdue executives faced any jail time;
and the Sacklers extracted more than $10 billion from the company before any penalties were paid. The Sacklers are living their own special—one
might say exclusionary--version of the American dream.
Easttown Township, Pa., is just outside Philadelphia. As such, Mare of Easttown, a seven-episode miniseries created and written by Brad Ingelsby
and directed by Zobel, does not fit the Appalachian purview of Hillbilly Elegy or much of The Crime of the Century. But drugs play a major role in
the story of Mare of Easttown, and in its larger scope the miniseries is consonant with the other films in that it portrays working-class Americans
living in constant fear, anger, and tragedy.
It is apparent from the beginning that Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), the
show's titular character, bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. A detective with the Easttown Police Department, Mare faces increasing
pressure from her superiors and from neighbor Dawn Bailey (Enid Graham) to find Dawn's daughter Katie, who has been missing for more than a year
. Mare has her own demons to deal with: her drug-addicted son Kevin has committed suicide, and Kevin's recovering addict girlfriend Carrie (Sosie
Bacon), mother of Kevin's small son Drew (Izzy King), has filed suit seeking to regain custody of Drew from Mare.
The first episode shifts focus between Mare and Erin McMenamin (Cailee
Spaeny), a young woman whose life makes Mare's look paradisal. Saddled with an out-of-wedlock baby, Erin lives with her abusive father Kenny
(Patrick Murney) and is forced to deal with her worthless ex-boyfriend Dylan Hinchey (Jack Mulhern) and his nasty new girlfriend Brianna
(Mackenzie Lansing). Erin's life continues its resolute downward spiral until, at the end of the episode, her corpse is sprawled in the local river.
This is as much as I am comfortable telling you about the plot of Mare of Easttown. There are any number of websites that discuss the story and
characters in detail, including the many red herrings (or, as one critic called them, "Mare-ings") Zobel and Ingelsby introduce on the way to
revealing Erin's murderer. Those websites are fun if you have seen the show, but must be shunned at all costs if you haven't.
The good thing about the red herrings is that they aren't a latter-day exercise in Murder, She Wrote-style gamesmanship. All of them are based
solidly on the most complex, richly imagined set of characters on any program since Mad Men. The behavior of those characters may shock us,
but it also moves us, and it never stirs our disbelief. Sometimes their behavior is unexpectedly funny—such as when we discover that Mare's
mother Helen (Jean Smart) hides her ice cream in an empty frozen-vegetables bag.
Above all, Zobel and Ingelsby remind us that Easttown is a small
community, and all the suspects know each other—sometimes too well. They make this apparent from the first scene, in which Mare answers a call
from an elderly woman who feels threatened by a man prowling around her house. Within a minute we learn that Mare knows both the old woman
and the prowler—that she has, in fact, known them both all her life. They are only two of a large group of Easttowners we meet, including Mare's ex
-husband Frank (David Denman); her teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice); her boss, Chief Carter (John Douglas Thompson); her best friend
Lori Ross (Julianne Nicholson); Lori's husband John (Joe Tippett), brother-in-law Billy (Robbie Tann), and son Ryan (Cameron Mann); and Deacon
Mark Burton (James McArdle), a priest the archdiocese moved to Easttown after accusations of sexual misconduct at his former parish. Zobel and
Ingelsby even give Mare two potential love interests: Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), writer-in-residence at the local college, and Det. Colin Zabel (Evan
Peters), a county detective brought in to help Mare with the Bailey and McMenamin cases.
Zobel and Ingelsby lead the audience through a jaw-dropping series of
events, including the sudden, violent death of one of the series' most lovable characters (no fair saying who, how, or when, though again you can
find that information easily). A motif runs throughout the story of otherwise good characters—including (especially) Mare herself—making
stupid and cruel decisions out of desperation. Yet there are also examples of unlikable characters showing unexpected decency and depth of feeling. Even more, Mare of Easttown maintains a pervasive sense of
community—a sense that these people, despite sinning against each other, also still love and support each other. There are exceptions, of course, but
again no fair citing them. By the time one of the characters delivers a message of reconciliation, you get the feeling that Easttown was always
more like Grovers Corners than Twin Peaks. The town, which seemed from the beginning a place of darkness and decay, suddenly begins to look idyllic.
The cast of Mare of Easttown has been deservedly showered with praise,
starting with Kate Winslet. As Mare, Winslet projects the weariness of a good woman who has seen too much of the world's evils, and who has had
to fight too much for what she once took for granted. Her Pennsylvania accent is pitch-perfect, except for one unguarded word in one
scene—"home"—which is pure Mayfair.
Among the rest of the cast, I was especially impressed by Nicholson, Smart,
Peters, and Graham, all of whom pierced my heart in ways I will never forget. Mare of Easttown is an unforgettable experience—a reminder that
a down-and-dirty crime drama can still move you to the depth of your soul.
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Writings
