The roots of the American recovery movement go back a century. The Oxford Group, a Christian organization, began in the 1920s; in the late 1930s Alcoholics Anonymous started a fellowship based on their founder Bill Wilson’s belief that a room of alcoholics talking to one another could be effective under certain conditions. “The only requirement for A.A. membership,” its guiding text insists, “is a desire to stop drinking.”
Since then, the recovery movement has become a profitable industry. While some institutions are legitimate, “Shuffle,” a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.
Flaherty became aware of this game while undergoing his own treatment for addiction. While much of the documentation of insurance malfeasance comes from archival footage (Flaherty also contrives some refreshingly effective animation), the interviews he conducts with addicts are the most gut-wrenching scenes here. They’re aware of what’s being done to them and are powerless to stop it, as if they’re caught on a carnival ride that’s gone out of control.
Their stories are alternatively hopeful and heartbreaking. The subjects who make it out alive do know how lucky they are. Flaherty seems to share with them an incandescent and entirely justified anger.
Shuffle Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters.
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