Side Effects: A Review
I’m feeling depressed — what else is new? — so it seems relevant to write about “Side Effects,” Soderbergh’s new — and apparently, gasp!, last — film. I would have put the gasp in em dashes, but I think that’s grammatically incorrect? Anyway, fuck you.
The film, ostensibly, is about a depressed young woman — Rooney Mara — whose husband —”Meatball Face” Channing Tatum — has just been released from prison after serving a four year term for insider trading. I have a terrible desire to just fill up this page with em dashes — also, has anyone ever told you depressions heightens insecurity? That’s why I keep on talking about the fucking em dashes, because I’m not sure how to use them. Like you give a shit. Do you give a shit? Fuck you.
A few days after Meatball returns, Rooney Mara tries to commit suicide by driving into a wall in the parking garage of the apartment building in Manhattan. She had to move there after losing her palatial estate in Greenwich. Might I take this opportunity to point out two bewildering flaws about this chain of events, for those of you who don’t live in New York:
1. Most people don’t move back into Manhattan when they lose all their money — they move to Queens.
2. No one in their right mind drives a car to work in New York City, not unless they live in Staten Island or New Jersey or have a Mercedes S500 with a full-time driver.
The details seem insignificant, but illuminate an overall narrative laziness on the part of Soderbergh, who makes no effort to make an implausible — but potentially thrilling — narrative at all believable.
Soderbergh has apparently claimed that “movies no longer matter” in the age of cable, which I’m half inclined to agree with. Films, I believe, will in the very near future be screened primarily in museums, where art goes after it’s died and been embalmed by academia. I actually don’t believe that at all, because movies are getting longer, and 3-D is like the next frontier, or something. Fuck you Soderbergh.
But seriously, Soderbergh has been complaining a lot in the media about how directors are treated by the movie industry. ”The worst development in film-making – particularly in the last five years – is how badly directors are treated,”he whined to New York Magazine. Such statements betray Soderbergh’s deep-rooted belief that he knows how to make great films, and that no one allows him to do so because they are all concerned with money and shit. I’m feeling so badly, that it’s hard to even follow my own train of thought, but what I mean to say is that Soderbergh seems to think he can make very wonderful works of art without having to do much work — but in actuality, his films have sort of become like blog posts. Shallow, quick and messy with grains of intelligent ideas. In other words, rather than improving his craft over the years, Soderbergh has become glib.
From previews, you might think that what happens after Mara runs into a wall is that she goes on a medication that turns her into a violent psychopath against her will. But no, Side Effects is not an episode on The Good Wife. It’s much more ridiculous than that.
After a long montage in which an increasingly depressed Mara tries to battle her demons — she throws up in the bathroom, she cries at a party, she almost throws herself in front of a train — she is prescribed a pill called Ablixa, which seems to work miracles. Then, on day, Meatball comes home from a job interview, and a zombie-like Mara stabs him three times in the stomach with a cutting knife. He dies and Mara cuts him up, fries him, and puts him on top of spaghetti. If you think I’m being serious, then you must not get the joke about Meatballs.
I say that Side Effects is not an episode of The Good Wife because Julianna Margoogleygues does not show up and win a multi-million dollar settlement from the pharmaceutical company that makes Ablixa. Rather, Mara is put into a mental institution; her psychiatrist who was treating her at the time, Jude Law, is largely held responsible for the crime, and his career falls into disrepair.
For some reason, it occurs to him that Mara might have been faking her depression so that she can ruin the reputation of Ablixa, and increase the stock price of another antidepressant by another pharmaceutical company, which is paying her an enormous sum of money. She is doing so in cahoots with her ex-psychatrist, Catherine Zeta Jones, or so Jude Law wearing hair plugs — I think — would have you believe.
What happens next is best described as “lesbian psychopaths do implausible things.” The movie, to move forward, must retrace clues left early in the narrative, a la Memento. Shit gets nutso bonkers, a la Homeland or even the last few episodes of House of Cards, which I clearly watched but have not yet reviewed. By the end, I was like, oh brother, and rolling my eyes and shit. I left feeling annoyed, and not even a little confused.
I can’t say the same for the old women who joined me in the bathroom afterwards. “I don’t get how she met up with Cathrine Zeta Jones in the first place,” one of them yelped at another one as she was peeing. What happened next is best described as “lesbian psychopaths do implausible things,” just kidding.
It’s annoying when a director doesn’t have enough respect for his audience to bother tightening his narrative — especially when cable television, with a few notable exceptions, does just the opposite. If Soderbergh really thinks that people no longer watch movies because of television, maybe he should think about how it’s not the fault of the movie studios, but the fault of lazy ass directors like him. Take that Soderbergh!
And now, to stop this fucking nonsense, I leave you with this unrelated thought: It’s interesting how sisters like Kate Mara and Rooney Mara can look totally different, but still have the same expressions. The end.