By PJ BROGAN
STAFF WRITER
The genre-bending, psycho-sexual thriller/ Pharmaceutical diatribe Side Effects—just released this Friday—is purportedly the final theatrical film of director Steven Soderbergh’s versatile and illustrious career. Soderbergh is one of those filmmakers who—unlike a Tarantino or a Scorsese—can not be pinned down to one type of genre or style of movie. He has made groundbreaking indie fare (Sex, Lies, Videotape), slick crime flicks (Out of Sight), stargazing heist films (Ocean’s Eleven), wacky Coen Brothers style shenanigans (Informant!), bachelorette fantasies (Magic Mike) and just about everything in between. If Side Effects is his last movie—a big if; most artists are Favre-esque when it comes to retirement—then the cinema world will be quite a bit darker with his absence.
Meanwhile, we have his latest movie to talk about, and Side Effects is certainly a movie that, if nothing else, defies expectation. I hesitate to divulge too much of the plot—the movie thrives on its shocking reveals and 180-degree turns—but basically a rather frail-looking young woman, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), welcomes her investment banker husband (Channing Tatum, Magic Mike) back from a four-year prison term for insider trading. The formerly decadent lives of the Taylors are now relatively modest and sterile, and Emily seems emotionally adrift. She starts to see a shrink, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law, Contagion), in order to cure the “poisonous fog bank” that is her mind. Banks, a patient, caring and intelligent man who is perhaps a bit too comfy in his high-rise psychiatric practice, prescribes a cutting-edge new drug to help cure her. The results, however, surprise both Banks and the audience.
I will not give you any more precise details of the plot, but it is not giving away too much to say that Side Effects dissembles both its genre and its characters—something that works both for and against the film. On the plus side, it is certainly a movie that demands your full attention and wit. The movie starts out as a rather staid denunciation of America’s need for prescription drugs to seal up our personal cracks and imperfections, turns into a sort of investigative procedural and ends as a battle of manipulative intellects. It is a movie that delights in a boldness that most studio pictures shy away from. The prevailing attitude in Hollywood— the land of remakes and sequels—is to do everything in the same boring conventional manner. Soderbergh and company should be rightly applauded for doing things differently.
The acting is also fantastic in Side Effects. Soderbergh has a distinct visual style that gives completely new looks to actors we have seen dozens of times. Law plays Banks with both kindness and intensity, and he creates a much richer character than his typical acting fare. Mara tantalizes with her creepy, piercing stare and again proves that she is one of the industry’s rising stars.
The downside to the movie’s narrative complexity is that we are not given time to really appreciate these characters. Soderbergh is so worried about the nooks and crannies of the plot, that Banks and Taylor are not treated as humans, but just cinematic tools. Just about every character has a hidden personality, and it becomes very difficult to really love a movie that does not let you care about who you are watching. Soderbergh will be missed because he always has the ability to make a movie like Traffic or Contagion, but, for a man who has told some great stories, his latest effort is a prime example of excellent technical craftsmanship without heart.