Anonymous Sister
Directed by Jamie Boyle
Unrated
Runtime: 93 minutes
On Demand October 17

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I think it's understandable to hear of a documentary about the ongoing opioid crisis and think "Sounds great, but not for me!" The cost of this epidemic is difficult to deal with when you're reading numbers from a news source, even before any of the people who make up those statistics have been given human faces and relatable histories. I don't blame anybody for skipping Anonymous Sister–director Jamie Boyle's feature-length film on the damage OxyContin did to her family–but I also think that the people who can stomach Boyle's presentation of story will be better off for having done so. There's a difference between knowing something and feeling it.

The two best documentaries I've seen on this subject are The Crime of the Century–Alex Gibney's HBO two-parter about the Sackler family and Purdue–and Oxyana–Sean Dunne's film about the residents of Oceana, West Virginia. Gibney delivers straight facts and examines how a pharmaceutical company was able to do so much damage with so much high-power support, while Dunne used one-on-one interviews to get at the human cost of the over-prescription of OxyContin. Boyle takes both approaches, focusing on the micro with her sister and mother's addictions and the macro by occasionally shifting to the question of why her family members would have been given the drug in the first place. That she manages to successfully cover the two angles without compromising either is impressive.

The first footage in Anonymous Sister that isn't shown in montage is from June 1996. We're in Colorado, in a suburban backyard, and Boyle is filming her mother, father, and sister on the family video camera. They're close-knit, and there's warmth apparent in all of the old footage Boyle chooses to bring in. There are some shades of Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary editing virtuosity in the way she makes collages of personal video footage and always knows how to pull in the perfect clip to underline a theme.

Boyle and her sister Jordan got swept up in the excitement around Olympic phenomenon Kristi Yamaguchi, as so many people did in the 90s. Jordan especially excelled at ice skating and the Boyles spent what disposable income they had supporting her burgeoning career. That meant hiring two coaches, a choreographer, dieticians, and psychiatrists. It also meant paying for dresses, skates, and so much other equipment. Jordan became one of the top skaters at her level in the country, but the pressure she put on herself and that she felt from her parents' life recalibration was crushing. "The sacrifices made me need to control the outcome so badly," she tells us in the film. “It made me so afraid of failing.”

It's important–and this is less Boyle’s framing as filmmaker and more the way her family genuinely cared for each other–that Anonymous Sister doesn't depict the Boyle parents as glory-driven. Jordan's mom, reflecting on the sacrifices her daughter is referencing, says, "You support your kids. That's what you do. You think." And even without the opioid addiction, the movie has a strong core in its examination of a family that doesn't realize its “you can do anything you set your mind to” love can be damaging until it’s too late. Their support for each other is, at its heart, beautiful. There isn't any maliciousness from any direction. And yet, it doesn't matter.

Then, the opiates come in, of course. When Jordan did tricks on the ice, she always landed on the same foot, which led to nerve pain. She was given painkillers, despite her career ending. Later, her jaw popped, and the hospital gave her Dilaudid. Everything immediately felt better. “I didn't know there was anything like that out there,” she says in the moment that always comes before tragedy in documentaries like this.

Jordan moved from drug to drug, always with what she believed was careful professional supervision, until she took OxyContin. Jamie's mother, for reasons unrelated to her daughter, also became addicted to OxyContin. Her doctors prescribed it to deal with (what they think is) rheumatoid arthritis. You can probably guess what happens, and that this isn't a film about Oxy's life-affirming splendor.

That's most of the film's central arc, and Boyle paces it all terrifically by occasionally zooming out from her family to discuss the history of opioids, the way they were marketed, when Purdue Pharma was forced to concede OxyContin was addictive and that it was, in fact, possible to build up a tolerance to it. She'll focus on how her mother realized Jordan was on the verge of death and then discuss the incentives available to Purdue sales reps if they successfully talked doctors into prescribing heavier doses of their product. None of it feels rushed, and none of it feels like it's getting in the way of anything else.

It's dangerous, making a documentary about your family. So many directors are too close to everything to realize they're being myopic and are too focused on understanding what happened to themselves. Boyle is doing the opposite here, taking Jordan and her mother as sadly common examples of people swept up in Purdue's marketing campaign. This is all in service of the empathy evident in every scene of the film. Boyle’s family's story is not unique, and by the end of Anonymous Sister, we've seen her visit recovery communities in Ohio and West Virginia and an anti-Sackler protest at the Met in New York. All of the betrayed Appalachians trying to recover from Oxy's wrecking ball are people here and not merely context for the story.

To say this is a hard watch is to understate the emotional wreck you become watching a family discuss the ways they think they failed each other. They're wrong, of course–they did every supportive thing they could, given the information they had at the time. But the shame they feel is difficult to experience. The Sacklers made it out fine. Purdue Pharma is fine. The sales rep with a guilty conscience has either rationalized anything or really didn't put together that what she was doing was making the world a worse place.

The residual effects of the addiction, even for a person in recovery, continue to haunt the Boyles. It may feel clinical for me to praise the structure of a documentary this human, but it really is stunning how Boyle is able to show Jordan's entire emotional spectrum here without feeling exploitative.

If anybody gets short shrift, it's Boyle herself. She's the anonymous sister of the film's title. We learn that she had a breakdown as Jordan and their mother were falling apart, but Boyle keeps her part in the story minimal. That can happen when you're as empathetic as Boyle–you value others above yourself. I'm not begging for documentary directors to include themselves more prominently in their own work, but I wondered why the film was titled Anonymous Sister if it was so ready to forget the anonymous sister. There'll be time to find out about Jamie Boyle later– I'm down for whatever she makes going forward.