Side Effects

Synopsis:  28 year old Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) eagerly welcomes her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), home from prison where he has served a four year sentence for insider trading. She is battling depression and a suicide attempt leads her to Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a psychiatrist who is happy to pay for his over-geared lifestyle by pimping for pharmaceutical companies.  When Emily’s medication leads to tragedy he finds his career, marriage and lifestyle rapidly coming unstuck.

True to form Steven Soderbergh follows up the fol-de-rol of Magic Mike with a plot-driven sleight-of-hand thriller. Way back when it would have been the names of Ray Milland and Lana Turner or Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott  on the marquee but now we have Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones headlining. Although up-dated to today’s taste (not least being a titillating relationship between Mara and Zeta-Jones) Side Effects is a film that owes much to the classic ingredients of 1940s noir - fatalistic stories of dubious morals and deceptive intentions and the bitter fruit that is their reward.

For a good while it is hard to tell where the film is heading as Side Effects appears to a bit of a heavy-handed morality play about Law’s pill-pushing brand of psychiatry.  There are however seeds of something darker planted here and there - a meeting between Dr Banks and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s vampish lady shrink, an insistent advertising campaign for an anti-depressant drug called Abilax - elements that hint at some looming development - an approach which stylistically recalls Soderbergh’s excellent 2011 thriller Contagion, not surprisingly so given that both films were penned by the same writer, Scott Z. Burns.

Then comes the big plot turnaround foreshadowed in the film's brief opening segment and the plot shifts gear, moving more directly into darker territory. Is Dr Banks an innocent, if rather purblind man who made some bad decisions or is he a pawn in a bigger game of female skullduggery as he believes? This question is answered with some far-fetched plotting that would have worked in the old film noirs but is way too convenient to be credible by today's standards.

Jude Law commands most of the screen time and he well suits this kind of white middle class professional role – smartly urbane yet louche enough to warrant our doubts. Why Catherine Zeta-Jones I have no idea. She’s really too big a star to be in such a relatively small role and that unwisely gives much of the game away.

Soderbergh’s direction is typically slick and after the slow-build the film moves along at a pace that is fast enough to prevent us finding fault with the narrative contrivances. Even so, in the latter stages as Dr Banks plays one woman off the other it becomes rather difficult to follow what is going on as double-cross follows double-cross before we are led by the hand to the morally-vindicating resolution in which the film's apparent initial concerns about a medicated society are completely forgotten about. On every level Side Effects is a journeyman film. It entertains enough in a superficial way but will be forgotten as soon as it's over.

 

 

Want more about this film?

    

Want something different?