The passing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 under then President Barack Obama opened up the floodgates for a new avenue of capitalism: the profiteering of addiction recovery. Obama’s Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Thomas McLellan, designed the infrastructure for addiction to be included in health coverage, a seemingly progressive decision for a more holistic understanding of healthcare, without mentioning that he himself stood to financially benefit from a system which, ironically, works to keep people inside cycles of abuse rather than help to set them free. Addiction healthcare is largely unregulated.
Director Benjamin Flaherty uses his own recovery from alcohol to explore the nefarious hamster wheel which has its epicenter in South Florida, the unofficial recovery capital of the world. In Shuffle, Flaherty provides an essential, if sometimes overly stretched, personal look at the way people in legitimate need of help are exploited for financial gain. Through portraits of a handful of people experiencing addiction, some of whom have spent up to ten years in over 30 sober homes, Flaherty clinically lays out the underbelly of an already shady healthcare system.
Shuffle is an Overdose of Subject Matter, Much of Which Could’ve Used More Attention
Shuffle is Flaherty’s first feature-length documentary as director, with previous work as an editor for projects with Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel. But in the summer of 2018, Flaherty woke up after what sounds like a particularly ferocious bender and got sober. The filmmaker uses a bevy of storytelling techniques to communicate his own life as well as that of others and the corrupted industry more broadly: passenger-seat vérité, straightforward talking head interviews, phone calls, narration from his basso voice, hand-drawn, stick-figure stop-motion animation, archival news footage and re-purposed stock images and videos.
No doubt Flaherty, who co-edited the film with Robin Schwartz and Jacquie Soohen, has a mountainous pile of footage to sort through from years spent alongside several subjects, yet the various methodologies to telling this investigative documentary actually make the film feel more threadbare than it actually is. At times, the flips from stylized, data-based explanations like the kind seen in The Big Short to intimate conversations with Nicole, a woman who was tossed between 36 sober homes in South Florida, feels jarring. One gets the sense that Flaherty has so much he wants to say, so much passion for the rotted pit at the center of this industry, that he tries too hard to service every angle.
That egalitarian approach both makes sure that his three main subjects are allowed to use their own voice, but it also prevents us from being as close to them as we might like. Cory, a perpetual patient whose no-nonsense understanding of the crooked system he’s in is oddly charming, still feels like an opaque person despite him being the person we spend the most time with. Because the lives of him, Nicole and others are cyclical, their appearances are, too. That’s an appreciated approach, but at only 82 minutes, it would’ve been nice to balance that out with more exposure to expert talking heads.
Shuffle is a solid primer for a massive subject, and Flaherty’s approach is a maddening introduction to a world that needs massive reform.
Those folks exist too, just at an infrequent distance. That’s not entirely Flaherty’s fault — many of these people fear talking out or directly to the camera for fear of retribution. One such person is a former “broker,” which is a polite way of saying modern human trafficker. Part of the reason the system seems doomed is because of the enormous reward for people whose entire job is to track down potential residents and incentivize their addiction through financial kickback from insurance providers. Many of these employees get lured in by the promise of being able to “help” folks in need, but find themselves instead hiding behind the cover of altruism for a wing of the American economy that is more evil than most.
Shuffle is a solid primer for a massive subject, and Flaherty’s approach is a maddening introduction to a world that needs massive reform. With access to more medication and treatment ironically paving the way towards more widespread addiction, regulation of the mental health industry is exponentially important. That’s a huge process. Where do you begin? With universal healthcare for all? Making housing a human right? Why not dismantle capitalism all together? Who could blame Flaherty for taking on too much with his documentary? The list of ills of healthcare in America is too much to fathom.