Side Effects (2013)

If Steven Soderbergh’s career can be defined in one word, it would be “efficiency.” When it comes to taking a script and putting it up on the screen, there has never been a director who does it quite as consistently and prolifically as him. Especially in the last decade or so of his career, he has been able to crank out one or two movies just about every year, and they’re all made in a way that makes you think Soderbergh has the filmmaking process down to a science. He knows exactly where to put the camera, exactly what he wants the actors to do, and exactly how the movie is going to wind up coming out the other end. However, it seems Soderbergh has lost some of his passion for filmmaking in recent years, and if recent comments are to be believed his new drama Side Effects is going to be his last theatrical release for a long while, if not ever. I’m not sure I’m buying into this retirement/sabbatical talk, but perhaps that’s just because I found Side Effects to be downright ridiculous and I don’t want this to be how Soderbergh’s career comes to an end. He’s a man born to direct movies, and that’s still apparent in every frame of this one, but here the story he’s directing just winds up being a pile of empty, unconvincing plot twists.

It starts off intriguingly enough, and then it goes off the rails so slowly that it took me a little while to realize that what I was watching was actually quite bad. Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) has spent the last few years in prison for insider training. When he gets out, he comes home to his wife Emily (Rooney Mara) who has been dealing with depression. After a strange suicide attempt, Emily is put on various medications, which wind up making her happy but also result in some strange… dun, dun, DUUNNNNN… side effects. Things just get weirder from there. Jude Law stars as the doctor that prescribes Emily the medication, while Catherine Zeta-Jones shows up as Emily’s doctor from a few years prior.

Side Effects was written by Scott Z. Burns, who has worked with Soderbergh in the past on such projects as The Informant! and Contagion, both of which were rather good. This is not, though Soderbergh does all he can to make this absurdity look and feel as good as possible. He gets great performances from his cast, as always, and the only person working harder than him to sell this hogwash is Mara. She actually plays the part just about perfectly, and I would go deeper in to why that is but that would involve discussing the plot in more detail. I may not particularly like where this movie chooses to go in its whiplash-inducing second half, but I have no interest in spoiling it for those who are interested.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it doesn’t use its billion plot twists for any particular reason. It just throws them at the audience and expects them to buy into it just because it’s unexpected. Also, there’s only so many times you can pull the rug out from under us and expect us to get back up again. It seems like circumstances change every five minutes in the film’s latter half, and after being intrigued for a while it suddenly hit me that I didn’t actually give a crap about any of this anymore. The more I reflected on all these new revelations, the more none of them made any sense. There’s no rhyme or reason to all the surprises in this movie; they exist merely to surprise the audience, and thus by the end there’s not a whole lot that can surprise us anymore. It’s just nonsense, albeit well-directed nonsense.

Perhaps Side Effects becomes much easier to enjoy if you’re able to just sit back and accept that the film has no deeper meaning to it at all. But considering how promising the film was in the early going, I’m not going to accept that. All the pieces are in place here for a critique/satire of just how medicated our culture has become, and for a while it looks like that’s the direction Soderbergh is going. By the end, the pharmaceutical industry is barely even a factor in the plot. (Though I’ll admit Mara has a great line near the end which seems to be Burns’ way of acknowledging just how far off the tracks he’s gone.) In just about every way, this movie seems like a missed opportunity.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that Soderbergh will indeed have another movie in theaters in the next five years. That’d certainly be an eternity for him, but not nearly as long a break as he seems to suggest he’s taking. He can explore other artistic avenues all he wants, but if there was ever a man that belonged behind the camera it is him. Even with this hokum, he is able to craft it into something at least somewhat deserving our respect. It would be truly disappointing to me if Side Effects winds up being his last theatrical film, because it hardly seems like an appropriate capper for such a fascinating career. It has all the trademarks of a great Soderbergh film—an all-star cast, near-perfect digital cinematography, etc.—but it can only cover up the script’s many weaknesses for so long.

Grade: C