Film Review: Side Effects

For movie details, please click here.

The films ad campaign hinted at something vaguely related to Contagion, playing up the fact that both movies share a director (Soderbergh) and screenwriter (Scott Z. Burns), and that they are structured around a specific modern-day fear. While that pandemic film was more a fully realized, flesh-and-blood fictional story than it was a docudrama, Side Effects is really a sleekly constructed noir where the pharmaceutical topicality is mostly backdrop.

Taylor is a 28-year-old graphic designer who looks somewhat adrift in her Manhattan apartment. She is awaiting the return of her husband Martin (Channing Tatum), sentenced to prison four years before for insider trading. The film starts up just before his release, a day shes eagerly awaiting. Once hes out, though, she seems unable to control her depression. The crying at work is one thing; ramming her car head-on into a wall is another. Taken to the hospital, shes examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Hes concerned about her suicidal tendencies, but takes Emilys word that shell start coming in for therapy and take her medications, so he lets her go.

At first, Side Effects looks like its going to be Emilys story, following her through the withering exhaustion of adjusting medications and dealing with the increasingly horrendous conditions they cause. Thats up until the point when a crime is committed, and the story shifts to Banks, who must explain to an ever-widening circle of questionersincluding a sly and cat-like Catherine Zeta-Jones as an earlier doctor of Emilyswhy he gave Emily what he did. Somebody should have read the fine print.

From there on, its a game of shifting narratives and re-examined assumptions that contains more than a couple of decoys. In other words, its the kind of film where at some point somebody is going to say the wrong thing to a person secretly wearing a recording device. With its glow of luxury living emanating from high-paying pharmaceutical consulting gigs and all the overmedicated characters, there is definitely a pointed critique here of the corporate drug complex. But long before the conclusion, those concerns are (wisely) sublimated to the service of its ultimately quite enjoyable mousetrap plot.

Soderbergh has claimed that this is going to be his last feature film. (Anything is possible, of coursehe also hinted at that after finishing Che in 2008, but hes knocked out another seven features since then.) Its a curious choice for a concluding film. But perhaps that is part of the point here. Instead of straining for a great and career-defining epic, hes made a cool and professional piece of work along the lines of 2012s Haywire that succeeds primarily in highlighting just how few smart and unassuming genre films are being made these days. As such, its a classy farewell.

View original post here:
Film Review: Side Effects