Side Effects

Film (2013)

With Rooney Mara (Emily Taylor), Channing Tatum (Martin Taylor), Jude Law (Dr. Jonathan Banks), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Dr. Victoria Siebert), Polly Draper (Emily’s Boss)

Scott Z. Burns, who wrote the screenplay for this film, also wrote the script for Steven Soderbergh’s last outing, Contagion (2011), a star-studded germ epic that based its suspense in the search for a cure.

Here, in Side Effects, the subject is also medicinal, but focuses on the psychological, and on psychopharmacological drugs. It is more of a mystery suspense thriller than Contagion was, involving more layers of narrative complexity than a Napoleon pastry. Contagion provided its own suspense in the form of a plague. In Side Effects, the plague, so to speak, is more human and requires a different kind of cure.

Despite the narrative complexity, this film, though not without entertainment value, provides a kind of contrived suspense that, though implausible, works up to a point. One watches all the pieces fall into place as the plot develops and it does generate some curiosity as things evolve, but seems, in the end, to be an overly manufactured thematic product.

Steven Soderbergh has recently announced some form of retirement from filmmaking; this film makes me wonder whether he is just burnt out. For someone who, as writer and director of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), started out as a promising and independent-minded auteur, he appears to have traveled the distance from independently offbeat to in-step, commercial, Hollywood director in a too-straight line. There must be some psychological and artistic strangeness in that.

This is an odd goodbye for one of Hollywood’s notables, certainly more of a whimper than a bang.

Jude Law (Dr. Jonathan Banks) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Dr. Victoria Siebert) both offer here a restrained gracefulness, holding down their respective corners with regal bearing, dancing around one another with deft turns. They play psychiatrists, partly cool, partly cunning, in ways that hardly shout recruit me for this profession.

The real center of attention is Rooney Mara (Emily Taylor), who, with all kinds of little gestures, keeps the viewer riveted. She is an actress capable of convincingly bearing a transparent expression, then revealing a completely unexpected undercurrent. That was the great thing about her brief, but brilliant, debut as Erica Albright, Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend, in the film, The Social Network (2010); in one memorable, beautifully delivered, line she showed how a placid pond could turn into a geyser. The effect is similar here.

Apart from Mara’s part, the direction seems somewhat off. The depiction of the home life of Dr. Jonathan Banks suffers most in this regard; the cool demeanor and hot passion of Dr. Victoria Siebert show themselves in an odd directorial mix as well.

In the end, the plot is too twisted and arcane to make a really interesting point. This might actually have been an opportunity to do something a bit more penetrating about the psychopharmacology business, as was done in a far more believably sophisticated way – regarding the agrochemical industry – in the film written and directed by Tony Gilroy and starring George Clooney, Michael Clayton (2007).

Side Effects turns narratively inwards in an even more complex way, and though teasing the brain with all the twists, the stimulation seems more episodic than penetrating.

There are not as many big cameos in this film as in Contagion, but there are a couple of interesting appearances. Polly Draper, who was one of the leads, as Ellyn, on the 1980s television hit thirtysomething, appears here, stylishly, as Emily’s boss. Peter Friedman had a memorable supporting role, opposite Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Bosco in the great 2007 film drama written and directed by Tamara Jenkins about grown siblings dealing with an aging parent, The Savages; here he has a minor supporting role as one of Jonathan Banks’ partners, doing a deft combination of earnestness and sleaziness once again.

– BADMan