Side Effects

"The good people sleep better, while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more."
-Woody Allen's "Side Effects"

I'm calling about Emily. The doctor-patient relationship has perhaps never been so devilishly portrayed on screen as it is in Steven Soderbergh's "Side Effects," an entirely different film from Woody Allen's collection of short stories. There are four main characters in this movie--a loving husband recently released from prison, his wife who experiences mental illness, and the current and former doctors treating her. But the main focus is on the young wife and her current doctor. The wife is played by Rooney Mara, most famous for her Oscar-nominated performance in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Mara is Emily, and her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is released from prison after serving a term for insider trading. Despite her reunion and a decent job, Emily is severely and hopelessly suffering from depression, to the point where she attempts to take her own life by crashing her car into a wall. In the hospital, she meets Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), the psychiatrist who will treat her. His remedies include a fairly aggressive approach using numerous pills, many of which cause her terrible side effects. After seeking advice from Emily's former psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones), he puts her on an experimental drug; its main side effect is sleepwalking.

The first half of the movie is an incredibly powerful and haunting look at our seemingly addictive lure to pharmaceutical drugs. Mara is haunting, and sympathetically so--how many of us will watch this movie and be reminded of an experience in which a patient pleaded for reason and clarity from their doctor? Why is this happening to me? Why isn't the medicine working? Will it ever stop? What's wrong with me? We've all heard the story of Pandora's Box being opened, unleashing terrible things into the world. Hope remained. While hope is, as "The Matrix" trilogy told us, both our best and worst quality as a species, hopelessness is undoubtedly a terrible state. Perhaps the drugs only make things worse.

But after an hour of messages that are borderline "Reefer Madness," Soderbergh begins his real fun. There's a thrilling twist, things become a bit wonky, and Soderbergh as he often does understands that his audience is too smart for a two-hour lecture. The feeling of hopelessness shifts from one character to another as our story twists and turns; it's reminiscent of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and "Psycho," two thrillers which start with a MacGuffin and decide to re-write the whole thing half-way through. Beyond that, Soderbergh is a director comfortable challenging our current groupthink position on who's "good" and "bad" in society. Consider his "Contagion," from two years ago, where Law played a journalist, usually the moralistic character in today's media; in "Contagion" he spreads fear and anarchy. There's a lot of thought put into Soderbergh's characters, even in more two-dimensional movies he has done recently, like last year's "Magic Mike."

The actors are commendable, though Tatum isn't given too much to do and Zeta-Jones sometimes come across as too Cruella DeVille-like. But Law is brilliant here, obsessed with setting things right, regardless of where that moral compass points, and so is Rooney, who is creepy without being gratuitous. She's assisted by trademark Soderbergh features--the almost other-worldly cinematography by Peter Andrews (look it up to see who he really is) and Thomas Newman's cryptic score. It's one of the best films I've seen in a while.


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