Mark Reviews Movies: BODY BROKERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 18, 2021

Utah (Jack Kilmer) and Opal (Alice Englert) are young, possibly in love, and addicts. Their drugs of choice are heroin, primarily, and crack. They rob a gas station at gunpoint, and Opal has sex with strangers for cash—anything to keep the drugs coming.

Then, a stranger, who gives each of them a cigarette, offers to buy Utah and Opal a meal at the diner where they're hanging out. His name is Wood (Michael Kenneth Williams), and while the two addicts wait for their food, the stranger gives them a nice, empathetic, and encouraging little speech. He was once where they were. He knows how hard it is to get out of this cycle, but look at Wood now, buying food for a pair of strangers with no questions asked and nothing being asked for in return. Utah and Opal could get out of their circumstances, and Wood, seemingly out of the kindness of his heart, would be happy to help them achieve that.

Writer/director John Swab's Body Brokers opens with this sense of grimness, broken by a feeling of sincere hope, but we also know there's going to be a catch. The film actually begins with a montage of images—of a rehabilitation facility along the coast of Los Angeles—and figures—doing the math on how much money a single bed in this facility costs, times how many bodies can fit into those beds, and multiplied by just how many similar facilities there are in the state of California alone.

Wood seems genuine, but the old adage that there's no such thing as a free lunch comes to mind. If that's true, there's definitely no such thing—no matter what Wood or anyone else may say—as a free, 90-day stay at an expensive drug rehab facility some 2,000 miles from Utah and Opal's home in Ohio.

Swab's film is a fictionalized version of real events—not specific ones, but general practices made possible by good intentions and plenty of bad, unscrupulous actors. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, part of that legislation made certain that drug rehabilitation was covered by private insurance agencies. That's a good thing.

On the flip side, though, there's a lot of money to be made with this guarantee, just as there has always been a lot of money to be made on account of the health care system in the United States. That's a different story to tell, of course, even if it's intrinsic to Swab's tale, in which Wood and his colleagues see a string of addicts, going into and out of and back into rehabilitation facilities across the country, as a kind of perpetual motion machine for a capitalistic enterprise. It doesn't matter if these people recover and stay recovered. In fact, there's more money to be made if they don't and can't.

The mechanics of this scheme are so simple, obvious, and successful that there's a real horror to the whole thing. Utah agrees to go to the exclusive rehab facility in L.A. with Wood, who arranges for the young man to obtain insurance through Wood's company. Opal stays behind, but Utah—under the care of a kind nurse named May (Jessica Rothe) and a caring psychiatrist named Dr. White (Melissa Leo), both of whom are recovering addicts and have no clue about the scheme—goes through detox and attends group and individual therapy sessions to get at the heart of his addiction. He seems to be on track toward starting his life anew.

Then, Opal arrives, and Wood offers him a "finder's fee" for referring her to him. At first, Utah doesn't get the scam, until Opal makes it clear that Wood paid her to come to L.A., but we do. All of the pieces fall into place with a single envelope filled with cash, which, maybe, someone with addiction problem and not ready quite recovering from that addiction might see as a way to score his or her drug of choice. Wood, his boss Vin (Frank Grillo), and everyone who works for the company that arranges addicts to be placed in these facilities throughout the country are hoping and counting on that to be case, because they make money from those places when another body gets a bed—or a previous body returns.

Swab dissects this case of fraud—based on real cases and indicative of a widespread issue—with precision. More importantly, he has created a real drama—with characters either sympathetic or complicated or downright awful and genuine stakes—to ground what could have been a dry or plot-focused dramatized exposé.

Utah, who sees the simplicity of the fraud and admires the way Wood has become wealthy from it, gets into the illegal game, hoping that work and money and a lot of superficial things will get his life in order. Instead, he is put face to face with constant misery, perpetuated by the business he's in, and starts to see through Wood, the stranger who becomes a colleague and a friend, as well as the façade of all this outward achievement.

It's not deep, for sure (Swab evades the real problem and ends the film with a more generalized statement about the toll of addiction in statistics). Even so, Body Brokers is compelling, both as a straightforward investigation into an exploitative crime that seems terribly easy and as an honest depiction of the grasping, suffocating tendrils of addiction.

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