Side Effects (2013)

***/****
starring
Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum

screenplay
by Scott Z. Burns

directed
by Steven Soderbergh

Sideeffects

by
Angelo Muredda
 Whatever you may think of the distinctive yellow patina that creeps across his
filmography,
Steven Soderbergh is something of a chameleon artist, prone to the
compulsive
shape-shifting that's led some to mischaracterize commercial work like
the Ocean's series as mere Hollywood capital to
be cashed in on
ambitious curios like Bubble.
If anything, it's the Ocean's
movies that most bear his signature in their attention to complex
systems run
amok and their indulgence of postmodern genre pastiche, which recur in
projects
as disparate as Haywire
and Magic
Mike
. Both tendencies are in full force in
psycho-thriller Side Effects,
ostensibly the last of Soderbergh's theatrical releases and in many ways the
most quintessentially Soderberghian despite its impersonal subject.
It's an unusual swan song but perhaps the ideal one for a director who's
always
revealed himself in his formalist rigor, the conspicuous act of
emptying
out his idiosyncrasies into preexisting generic containers–in this
case, half-a-dozen of them.

Written by Scott Z. Burns, of Soderbergh's The
Informant!
and Contagion,
Side Effects
is a difficult film to parse without giving the trick
away, and as with the majority of Soderbergh's formal exercises, the trick is
half the
story. We open with a mystery, easing into a slow tracking shot through
a New
York apartment that's tastefully arranged save for the spots of blood
that lead
to the kitchen. From there, we turn back three months to meet Emily
(Rooney
Mara), a young bride waiting on finance-guru husband Martin (Channing
Tatum) to
finish his prison term for insider trading. The stress of losing and
regaining
Martin triggers Emily's long-dormant depression, causing blackouts and
apparent
suicide attempts that put her in the employ of psychotherapist Jonathan
Banks
(Jude Law), the sort of high-rolling doctor who's all too happy to
sidle up to
pharmaceutical lobbyists like Emily's former therapist (Catherine
Zeta-Jones).
What starts as a fairly routine, even refreshingly straightforward
melodrama
about mental illness rapidly mutates into something else as Emily falls
prey to
her miracle drug's titular side effects and we circle back to the
opening shot.

Mileage will vary over how far the spectator
is willing to go with the movie's increasingly absurd plot
machinations, but
there's no denying that the gambit is built into the conceit of a film
that's
ultimately about its own ability to cast off its skin and transform
itself several times over. The biggest surprise here is that the transformations are
so
engaging, with each one hinging on a vertiginous moment in which we
have to
refamiliarize ourselves with what we're watching. There's an
airlessness to
Soderbergh's weaker experiments that turns them into homework–even a
bona fide
hit like Magic
Mike
starts to feel dutiful when it
lapses into its moralistic B-plot about the fresh-faced bad seed in the
male
stripper business. Not so here. The early passages where Emily's
medical
regimen distorts her perception is masterful phenomenological horror
with an
unmentionable twist. Under the usual Peter Andrews guise, DP Soderbergh
gets a perverse
kick out of rendering Mara's emerald dolls' eyes and lily-white skin as
alien
features that begin to seem equally strange to herself, glimpsed in their
uncanny
familiarity through a number of funhouse mirrors. The subsequent shifts to a
procedural set in the spacious offices of Big Pharma and to a
conspiracy thriller
about an unreliable defendant who turns her legal defenders into
patsies are
just as enjoyable, albeit as kitsch, anchored nicely by Law's twitchy
performance as a Hitchcockian wrong-man in the modern world, the sort
of role
you'd expect to see Michael Douglas play.

The spectre of Douglas, soon to star as Liberace in
the director's first post-theatrical project, rears its head in a more
profound way in the less impressive closing reel, and not just because Side
Effects
cedes so much time to Jones, Douglas's real-life
spouse, the weak link in
an otherwise strong ensemble. To anyone who hasn't read Soderbergh's recent
VULTURE interview
 about the
pleasures of Fatal
Attraction
, the script's final descent into Adrian Lyne
country is a surprise, but unlike the other twists, it's a mixed
success. A late
confrontation between a pair of mutually backstabbing fair-weather
lesbians is
staged with all the finesse of George Clooney's clunky takedown of
Tilda
Swinton in Michael
Clayton
, itself a Soderbergh homage counting on our
familiarity with Clooney's Danny Ocean cool to make even a modicum of
sense.
That roughly the same two-hander is repeated moments later with a
different set
of players suggests there's a neat dramaturgical geometry at work here,
but the
muted register doesn't do this overwhelmingly hammy material any
favours. While I
wouldn't go so far as to call Side Effects's closing pair of hallway
showdowns–bathed, as
usual, in mustard–a reverse hat-tip to Tony Gilroy's, they are
further
proof that Soderbergh's minimalist register doesn't jive with every
genre: Sometimes a grandstanding climax that ends in a snake's just
comeuppance
deserves to be played as pulp, not jazz.

There's also the matter of what, exactly, Burns's
script is trying to say, not just about the mendacious nature of young
women
but also about the malleability of the mentally ill. As in Contagion, which
goes on to paint Gwyneth Paltrow's adulterous
wife as Typhoid Mary long after her skull is cracked open in the name
of
science, there's no excusing the misogyny imbedded in the
premise. Yet
Soderbergh's ambitious genre mimesis throughout suggests another, more
interesting reading: that although women and depressives might well be
liars and cheats, so too are filmmakers, none more so than the director
himself–the only person truly responsible for the blood trail in the
apartment, if you
think about it. That isn't exactly an ethical message, though it seems a
fitting
note to end on for a filmmaker who's always been drawn to stories about
con
men, and whose greatest aesthetic touch has been to pull off his formal
cons
alongside them.

Become a patron at Patreon!