Side Effects, director Steven Soderbergh's latest (and he claims last) movie is a frustrating watch. Soderbergh is a skilled director who is more than capable of handling a wide variety of material from serious (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) to pop corn (pick any entry in the Ocean's franchise). Side Effects seems to want to be both, or more to the point pretends to be a serious film while in reality is just a bucket of pop corn. I have nothing against cinematic empty calories, but this bucket has way too many unpopped kernels.
The story centers on Rooney Mara (granddaughter of the late New York Giants owner Wellington Mara) who plays a woman suffering from severe depression and Jude Law, playing a psychiatrist who prescribes her a new trial anti-depressant drug. Her husband (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after doing four years for insider trading, and the adjustment back to life on the outside seems to be rougher for the wife than for her newly freed spouse. She soon finds herself under professional care after an accident that looks suspiciously like a suicide attempt. Catherine Zetta-Jones also appears as a psychiatrist who had treated Mara's character in the past. From there things get rather complicated, and purposely so. At one point the movie seems to go nowhere, only to find a direction that, while meant to represent a twist, was actually rather predictable.
Soderbergh is a fine craftsman, who knows how to use the camera and direct actors (he's known for using ensemble casts, though I'm not sure this counts as one). My problem is not with the execution of the film but with its pointlessness. He engages here in misdirection, giving his viewers visual cues (sometimes hitting them over the head with them) that are unmistakeably meant to lead us to draw certain conclusions that in the end prove to be false positives. That's all well and good, but all this subterfuge leads to rather pedestrian conclusions. I didn't walk out of the movie feeling like I gained any insights into human nature or the problem of evil, things that any psychological thriller trying to walk in the shoes of Alfred Hitchcock should at least try to shoot for. Then he commits the cardinal sin of contemporary American cinema: he takes what is an otherwise dark story and concocts a needlessly, and unlikely, happy ending.
For about the last year or so Steven Soderbergh, and some of his friends in the movie business, have been floating the idea that the 50 year old director will be retiring after this picture. I sincerely hope not, for no other reason than I would hate his last effort to be this camouflaged piece of rather common entertainment.
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