SIDE EFFECTS (Stephen Soderbergh 2013)

[Chris Knipp]

Stephen Soderbergh: SIDE EFFECTS (2013)


ROONEY MARA AND CHANNING TATUM IN SIDE EFFECTS

Meds madness

Side Effects is an elegant looking and watchable but ultimately shallow feature from Steven Soderbergh (he says it will be his last) in which the taking of anti-depressants leads to mayhem for a young couple with issues. Rooney played the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Fincher's US remake of the Swedish series starring Noomi Rapace. And there's a similarity between the cold cleverness and far-fetched machinations in this story and in Alain Corneau's last film, Love Crime, in Brian De Palma's unrelesed remake of which, Rapace plays the protagonist. (Ludivine Segnier, in the original by Corneau, is better in every way than these Dragon Tattoo ladies.) In both movies, Love Crime and Side Effects, men are treated as tools by women whose relationships have a lesbian element. People live and work in coldly flashy locations. In both movies the respective Dragon Tattoo girl implicates herself in a murder, with a tricky way of exculpating herself that later backfires. Love Crime gradually moves from cutthroat corporate competition to a crime of passion. Side Effects rather suddenly shifts, part way in, from an arguably timely study of the complications of Big Pharma's over-promotion of psycho-pharmaceuticals to a more conventional crime thriller. In Soderbergh's movie, energetically cool though one-dimensional turns by Jude law and Catherine Zeta-Jones as warring psychiatrists add luster to a nifty if uninvolving puzzler. Does any of this matter? I don't think so.

Side Effects (written by script doctor Scott Z. Burns) reads like any Eighties video you might have rented to watch on a rainy evening. You'd feel lucky you'd picked up something with so much class. But the hokey plotline doesn't survive in bright daylight. The shallow characterizations leave little impression after the puzzles have been sprung open. I got more pleasure from the reds in a shot of a bar -- Soderbergh's own cinematography (done under his normal nom-de-lens Peter Andrews) is good -- than from the action. The way Side Effects is being praised owes a lot to its release in the winter movie dumping season, when much of what hits the screen is loud, crude, and macho. Law, Mara, Zeta-Jones, even Tatum provide satisfactions one won't get from the likes of Stallone, Schwarzeegger, or Statham.

Of course Soderbergh, whose career this alleged swan song is making people mull over, has tried many genres and done well at most of them. Even spectacular bores like Che have been controversial and praised. But when you look back over the whole trajectory you may begin to wonder if he ever cared deeply about any of it. The seeming promise of Sex, Lies, and Videotape grew out of the discomfort and voyeurism it contained, the regional setting, and the freshness and promise of a filmmaker who was not going to settle on a real style. He has often plumped instead for genre pastiches, as in his previous movies,Contagion and Haywire. Side Effects, like its disease-scare predecessor Conrtagion, isn't really saying anything. Traffic was breathless and exciting, but it was nothing more than a remake of a good British mini-series. It and Erin Brokovich deal superficially with issues in glib pop terms, but the commitment isn't there, the subject matter used up as fodder for thrillers. Soderbergh is a smooth operator, when what we really want is edge, intensity, and caring.

Maybe better in the end are the director's more experimental small budget efforts like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience that few saw, where Soderbergh took some chances. The most enjoyable efforts were the patently goofy comic caper movies whose fun grew from byplay among stars like Clooney and Pitt, again genre pastiches (of the Rat Pack Ocean's movie) and worked till they'd worn thin. Of some Soderbergh movies the less said the better. Others, like Underneath, King of the Hill, Out of Sight and The Limey, we'd like to remember better and would if there were a coherent pattern and style to unify them, which there is not. Soderbergh is, overall, surprisingly competent, partly through his savvy in maintaining control over his finished products. But he is like a lounge pianist who can play any tune you throw at him, but will never get to do a recital. It's the nature of the film criticism game that if you went to the right film school you may talk of the "formalist rigor" of this "last" Soderbergh movie, but if you're more Old School you will see it, as I do, as another example of his "cynical banality." Burns' script isn't saying anything: it's politics is just a pseudo-hip come-on.

Releases for Side Effects: US 8 Feb. 2013, UK 8 March, France 3 April.

[Johann]

Thanks for that Chris.

You haven't mentioned Soderbergh's Schizopolis or Kafka with Alec Guinness.
His best film in my opinion: The Limey. Hands down.
Schizopolis is an amazing piece of work- a Criterion release just like his Che, a film I really admire, not a bore to me at all.
Che is Grand.

I don't know Soderbergh's mindset or how he chooses his projects, but he's a great filmmaker. I will never watch the Ocean's 11 movies or other films like Haywire or Side Effects. I prefer his lean and mean and serious films, like Che- even though Schizopolis is a comedy.
The fact that he is the man behind the camera on most of his movies makes me give him massive respect.
I think he should just step away for awhile and then come back and knock us the fuck out.
He is capable of making Masterpieces- TRAFFIC is a Masterpiece of an adaptation. It is raw and REAL.
It's a film for the Ages- so well crafted.
If he's retired for good he can hold his head real high.
I'm insanely jealous of his filmography. It's varied, like Kubrick's was, genres, etc.
He's won the Palm D'or.
He's contributed a LOT to cinema. I think he cared deeply, Chris.
You have to, to make an epic like Che. Watch it again, with a few glasses of Brandy beforehand.
Have a nice glow and then put on Che.
You will be enveloped. Give yourself a whole night to get into it. That movie is the full meal deal. Pure Cinema to me.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for all this, Johann. Corrective acknowledged. I have no desire to seem mean-spirited. You know me better than that, I hope.

I did mention THE LIMEY. Look again. I'm very surprised you mention Soderbergh in the same breath with Kubrick. Maybe you should rethink that. I do give SS credit for plenty of experiments. But that's part of the trouble: his entire career seems like an experiment, tying on styles and never settling on one. I don't see 1/50th of the passion Kubrick put into his great films. You won't see the OCEANS ones? Many think he's best at those complicated setups and loose ensemble performances. Okay, and I won't see SCHIZOPOLIS or KAFKA. Actually I did see KAFKA. A snooze, like CHE. But I do not deny that he is highly accomplished, and certainly admirable for doing a lot of his own cinematography. But if too glasses of brandy are necessary to enjoy a movie, you must excuse me. I like to get my highs from the film itself.

[Johann]

Liquor is not required to enjoy Che. But it would help. :)

I understand what you're saying. He does seem to be a director who is exploring without a compass, but I think he always landed on his feet.
The Oceans 11 movies are not my cuppa. I don't relate to them at all. Nothing in it for me. I don't know who the intended audience is with those flicks. Just eye candy for the ladies?

There is an undeniable craft in Soderbergh's works. Just as there is an undeniable craft in Kubrick.
Kubrick is more painstaking, more intense, more visceral, agreed.

[Chris Knipp]

Not in the same breath, is all I can say. Or in the same breath with any of the Hollywood greats either. Yes of course there is craft, at the expense of much else. Visceral they are not. Or when they are, its manufactured. Thus Armond White's phrase, "cynical banalityh." I did see Che in the NYFF, with an intermission. It was a slog. I have missed some of Soderbergh's more experimental ones but I have seen THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE and BUBBLE and reviewed them. Have you seen them?

The OCEANS are very much my cuppa. They are a lot of fun, and very ingenious too.

[Chris Knipp]

Armond White compares Walter Hill and Soderbergh:

Don't know if I can get behind White's endorsement of BULLET TO THE HEAD (which I've seen but not digested), but I like this typically clear and provocative comparison, which is very likely valid. The review of his career that Soderbergh's claim of retiring gives rise to makes him not seem much of a loss to cinema. Read Armond White's whole essay (whose opening is quoted below) on City Arts here. It begins:

At Cinema’s Crossroads
by ARMOND WHITE on Feb 6, 2013 • 9:00 am

This week America’s most overrated filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, gets booted out the arena by the country’s most underrated great filmmaker, Walter Hill.

The simultaneous release of Hill’s Bullet to the Head and Soderbergh’s Side Effects perfectly contrasts the art of genre filmmaking with the pretense of art filmmaking as genre. After a decade off, Hill returns to cinema with a Sylvester Stallone action movie that streamlines moral complexity and aesthetic mastery while Soderbergh pretends another exploration of topical issues by dully manipulating thriller clichés.