“If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m going to blow my brains out.”
— Steven Soderbergh, as quoted by Matt Damon in the Los Angeles Times, December 2010
Lo and behold, Steven Soderbergh, rebel in spirit more than in practice, has given us Side Effects, a film rife with over-the-shoulder shot-reverse-shots, constructed virtually the same way every director-for-hire has cut together conversations since the dawn of the talkies. Bitch, moan, comply — never mind that plenty of directors, including Soderbergh himself, have revealed the superfluity of this film syntax.
After a string of at least five winning features in a row, Soderbergh has delivered his worst film since Solaris, and it’s sad to see a director with such maverick ethos acquiesce so thoroughly to the Faustian temptation of Hollywood formula. Usually, even Soderbergh’s failures are interesting ones, but this picture is flat-out lazy.
That’s said, it’s easy to get hooked into the clinical spell this film casts, and it can be argued that the first hour of Side Effects is something of a masterpiece, before it topples like a magnificent Jenga tower. Rooney Mara plays Emily, a 28-year-old woman with a history of depression that seems to be recurring upon the release of her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) from prison, after serving time for insider trading. Emily is soon led to the care of Dr. Jonathan Banks, a hospital psychiatrist with his own cushy practice. Like many mental health professionals, he’s all too quick to prescribe the latest miracle pill du jour suggested by Big Pharma, of whose wheels he frequently greases.
Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay is peppered with references to antidepressants both real and imagined. Zoloft, Ablixa, Efexor, Deletrex: These are the companies, or ones just like them, that pay for our network news broadcasts, buy off physicians, and turn us into a nation of zombies. And at its best, Side Effects creates a vivid sense of their pervasiveness in American life.
Not to mention their dangers. Upon taking one of these regimens at the good doctor’s urging, Emily commits a crime that immediately turns into a media circus that threatens Jonathan’s personal and professional lives. The role of prescription pills puts doctoral collusion in the national spotlight, and, as an enlightening bedtime conversation between Jonathan and wife (Vinessa Shaw) reveals, the questions “did she do it?” and “Is she guilty?” yield very different results. Sensitive to the moral complexities of this issue, Side Effects is, thus far, like Dostoyevsky plugged into the 21st-century zeitgeist.
For a while, the film moves with an eerie poise, aided by unusual cutaways and an ominous score suggestive of a closeted horror film. Just as in Soderbergh’s last feature, Magic Mike, genre seems hardly a consideration, as the director shuffles between moods and textures with a mental patient’s unpredictability. In fact, everything from the writing and direction on through to the cinematography and the acting — Rooney Mara is exceptional, channeling her instability far better than Keira Knightley’s over-praised performance in A Dangerous Method — is so accurate and effective that the movie’s downward spiral into abject silliness is intellectually devastating.
In an effort to save his own hide (and marriage), Jonathan begins to explore Emily’s past, particularly her relationship to her previous shrink, Dr. Siebert (a buttoned-down Catherine Zeta-Jones). He notices that Emily’s signs don’t necessarily point to crazy, and he sniffs around for conspiracy — staying up all night on research, chugging Red Bulls, asking a former partner for an Adderol boost.
Eventually, the truth will emerge, but Side Effects is a much more interesting film when its nefarious possibilities are nebulous rather than defined. The revelations are ludicrous, presented to us in the kind of cut-rate montage flashback that should drive an artist like Soderbergh crazy. Instead, he embraces the clichés without irony.
Worst of all is the repurposing of Jonathan from a borderline-unethical part of the problem to its crusading solution, thereby absolving him of his complicity in a heinous crime. The gray area that made Side Effects such an essential drama for our times is painted over in a bland black and white.
SIDE EFFECTS; Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Vinessa Shaw, Catherine Zeta-Jones; Rated:R; Release date: Friday in most area theaters