Steven Soderbergh’s latest film (about his fifth since he first announced his retirement, and the latest that’s supposed to be his last film ever) is, among other things, a look at the pharmaceutical business and our overmedicated culture. Side Effects stars Rooney Mara as a depressed young woman cycling through a gamut of anti-depressants, Jude Law as the doctor writing her prescriptions, Channing Tatum as her fedora-wearing, ex-con husband, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a drug pushing psychiatrist. It’s the sort of movie that lives off of its twists and turns. It tells a story that involves murder, infidelity, and deception, that keeps you guessing what’s going to come next and why exactly everything is happening the way it is—so it would be a shame to focus on critiquing the story and consequently giving too much of it away. Instead, let’s focus on other things.
First off, this is a Soderbergh movie, so we know that it’s pretty much guaranteed to look great and give its performers ample opportunity to show off their strengths. And, predictably, the camera work here is noticeably inventive but assured, and Mara and Law—getting the two meatiest roles—manage to be great emoting through characters who necessarily have to maintain quite a bit of mystery regarding their motivations. That’s the other thing this film does well: build its mystery. Once things start getting dramatic and violent you don’t know what to believe. At times Side Effects feels like it could be a conspiracy story, at other times it feels like it could veer off into light sci-fi. Trying to keep up maintains your engagement, for at least the bulk of the film.
What doesn’t work so well is the places the film’s mysteries go. Again, talking too much about what this movie is about would kind of ruin it, but it can’t go unmentioned just how bad the twists that come late in the film are. Not only do you see them coming before the script wants you to, but they’re also the kind of twists that negate everything the movie has built and the viewer has invested themselves in so that they can pull the cheap trick of pulling the rug out from under everyone. What starts off as a pretty simple character study focusing on one woman’s struggle turns into a needlessly complex web of motivations and plot inconsistencies that you need a score card to keep track of, and eventually the film transforms from feeling like entertainment into feeling like work. The next time Soderbergh decides to come out of his fake retirement and make another movie, let’s hope he does it with a better script.
