NAPLES INTERNATIONAL FF REVIEW: Ondi Timoner’s COMING CLEAN effectively shines a light on the opioid crisis
It can’t be easy to make addiction into something cinematic. There are only so many ways to shoot a 12-step group, or hospital scene, or Congressional hearing, especially in a documentary where they’re all happening for real, in ways they always have. But experienced documentary director and co-cinematographer Ondi Timoner (Mapplethorpe) gets creative in Coming Clean, which recently won the Impact Award at the Naples International Film Festival. Shooting much of her B-roll at golden hour, utilizing hand drawn animation for scene transitions, and more complex animation in the style of anatomical textbooks to illustrate some of her metaphors, she’s made a movie about opiates most viewers won’t take their eyes off of. It feels weird to compliment a true-life story on such a dark topic for visual beauty, but it’s the truth. Let’s just stop short of calling it intoxicating.
The focus of Coming Clean is opiates, which, as several talking heads point out, leave a trail of bodies that would be deemed a life-changing national emergency if caused by terrorism, plane crashes, or anything more visual and camera-friendly. Hence, perhaps, all the visual flair Timoner uses to get us watching and listening. And yet, while this seems to be a new problem, it’s not. Oxycontin and Fentanyl constitute a third wave, following those that originated with opium and morphine.
All the addicts onscreen are self-aware that their addiction is being treated more as a disease than a crime nowadays because this is a drug that disproportionately affects white people. (Salt Lake City, of all places, is used as an example of the problem at its worst.) And if that’s what it takes for society to see something as a problem, it reflects poorly on us as a whole. On the other hand, if that’s what it takes to get us to start looking at loneliness and depression as root causes, and to turn to medicine rather than prison, at least we’re getting there now.
It makes for slightly strange optics, then, that one of the subjects is Salt Lake City mayor Ben McAdams, as he, a liberal white man, runs for Congress against Mia Love, a black conservative woman. We don’t hear her positions at all, though a couple of clips of her with Donald Trump are clearly meant to inspire instant negativity. That works in the here and now, but also leaves us unclear what Trump’s position on opioid addiction relief is. It might be nice to know for sure, assuming he has ever provided a coherent answer.
More damning are the comparisons of the pharmaceutical companies to big tobacco, as we follow a prosecutor who helped take the latter industry down, and now pursues the latest legal drug peddlers. Like the tobacco barons, they’ve been actively deceptive as to the nature of their product. And that in turn makes discussing any possible efficacy of said product. Can opioids be useful for people with chronic pain? If they aren’t, how does anyone even get prescribed them any more? Until their “pushers,” as such, do as the title of the movie suggests and come clean, we may never know.
There aren’t enough hours in a reasonable feature to cover everything relating to a topic like this, of course. But Timoner offers a great starter course, with visual aids second to none.
