For a few years now, headlines around the world have made note of the Most Medicated Generation, the millennials who have been prescribed pills for everything from behavioral issues to depression and anxiety. By some estimates, nearly 25 percent of university-aged kids are on some form of prescription drug — a sharp uptick from any previous generation. These facts and figures, of course, make a movie like “Take Your Pills” — a potent but messy documentary — inevitable. It’s inevitability, though, doesn’t make it any less necessary, as “Take Your Pills” takes aim at Adderall and Ritalin and the mind and mood altering realities such drugs have created for millions of Americans — for better or worse.
“Take Your Pills” starts with the obvious: Adderall’s ubiquity on college campuses, both as a necessary prescription drug and an illegal substance that students buy under the table to fuel all-night study sessions and end-of-term finals. For anyone who’s been anywhere near a college in the last decade, nothing about this will be surprising, but the candid nature of the students put on screen is still startling. What’s even more fascinating, though, is the introspection and reflection that director Alison Klayman (“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”) manages to make clear. Adderall, it becomes painfully clear, is not always the super drug it’s purported to be for those who have relied upon it for years — in fact, for many, the person they are on Adderall is not exactly the person they want to be.
While much of Klayman’s film focuses on young, college-aged kids, it bounds effortlessly around the country, exploring the various types of people whose lives have been altered by Adderall, from Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley techies to professional football players to music moguls to vulnerable high school teens. For most, the drug started out as a sort of cure-all: it helped them keep that scholarship, train a little harder, be a bit more productive, or generally just achieve. And while Klayman makes it clear that for some, Adderall truly is a necessity, others slowly crashed into addiction, relying on the harsh pick-me-up of the pill to get through the day and then a sedative to sleep at night — a perilous cycle, especially for those not getting their fix through a doctor.
Generally, “Take Your Pills” juggles each of these threads with ease, despite at times feeling like a product of the attention deficit generation it’s examining: cluttering the screen with animations and frantic cuts. Still, Klayman rounds up an empathetic cast of subjects and affords each some dimensionality, which is really where the film shines. There’s a level of attention and intimacy that’s startlingly comforting. But between these portraits, Klayman assembles the long and ugly history of Adderall and the amphetamine at its heart. She stops short of politicizing “Take Your Pills” by indicting the pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists that might very well be the root cause of this generational reliance — which for a film as thorough as it is, feels disappointing.
At its most interesting, though, “Take Your Pills” flirts with what precisely this addiction to achievement — and the willingness to sacrifice selfhood to get it — says about American culture. It’s a fascinating and terrifying reality, because for all those who use Adderall for that extra push, to cram in that extra hour of study, or that extra workout set, there are countless others who feel they have to use Adderall just to keep up with the norm (not to mention those who simply need it to function). But this new reality — of Adderall and the dozens of new cognitive-enhancement pills that come onto the market every day — begs the question: What is normal anymore? As one college student asks: If I achieve something on Adderall, did I really achieve it, or did Adderall?
They are tough and necessary questions that make “Take Your Pills,” for all its dizzying energy, a grounded and rigorous film. Though at times, it feels too squeamish to lean all the way into an idea or too hard on a particular truth, which makes it feel too deliberate and maybe not quite the earnest dissection it could be. Still, through and through, Klayman’s film is a searing look the havoc that a single pill as wreaked upon a culture and the fact that — for the foreseeable future — it’s not going anywhere. [B]
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