Side Effects

Most reviews of Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects complained this film switched gears/genres, starting out as a critique of big pharmaceuticals but turning into a whodunit. That suggests a film of poor structure. But the film turns out to be a tight, cohesive narrative if you take the apparent topics as metaphors. As one should in textual analysis.

For example, Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) is literally an inside trader, indeed convicted of that. But the other key characters are in their own way inside traders, too. Psychiatrist Dr Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) takes advantage of her professional position and inside knowledge for her own personal advantage, both as she becomes intimately involved with a patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) and as she manipulates the drug Ablixa shares on the stock market. The women score huge profits by short-selling the drug’s stock as it plummets. Victoria publishes a paper on the drug’s sometimes causing sleepwalking both to give Emily a false alibi and to charge Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) with incompetence. Emily also uses her position as Troubled Patient to play, manipulate and betray both her shrinks, Banks as well as her paramour and co-conspirator, Victoria.

The film’s hero is the most complex inside trader. In the first half Jonathan Banks parlays his professional position to score a huge grant from a drug company. This may not be illegal or immoral (as Martin’s and Victoria’s inside trading respectively are) but it does severely compromise his integrity. Later, in order to salvage his career, profession and marriage, Banks takes unscrupulous personal advantage of his position as Emily’s court-appointed shrink to uncover her plot and, with the DA’s help, to thwart her and Victoria’s fatal scheme. This inside trading is primarily intended to serve his personal advantage but it has the socially constructive side effect of bringing Victoria to criminal justice and Emily -- already released from her murder charge -- to poetic justice. She’s left in the mental institution under careful guard, with a heavy tranquilizer to level out her sociopathic extremes. 

As the title suggests, side effects is clearly another unifying metaphor. The literal side effect is the Emily/Victoria plot to blame Emily’s murder of Martin on her drug, Ablixa. As the plot unfolds we find that this drug’s side effects were not proved at fault. (The film could have been funded by a big pharmaceutical. But we buy Emily's act because we're already disposed to suspect big pharm.) Metaphorically, among the side effects of Martin’s jail term is his meeting another convicted moneyman with a new scheme for wealth and his wife Emily’s detachment from Martin. In his absence she becomes involved with Victoria and their complicated plan is hatched. A side effect of Jonathan’s sellout to the pharmaceutical company is his vulnerability to the charge of improper prescription. His appointment as Emily’s shrink has the rather unfortunate side effect of destroying his life. Fortunately, his self-restoration has the side effect of exposing Victoria and Emily.

For all the attention to Ablixa -- including the film’s promotional invention of a real website for the fictional drug -- nobody uses it here.The fake truth serum and the final Thorazine are the only literal drugs on view. But again, fiction works in metaphors. With her husband in jail Emily finds she is addicted to the high life he criminally gave her. For a sustaining fix she turns to Victoria and they scheme to kill him and make a fortune on Ablixa stock. When Victoria appears to abandon her, Emily turns to Banks for her next fix. As she strives to recover the life Martin gave her, Jonathan strives to recover the life she destroyed. He proves as obsessive and unscrupulous as she is, though less pathologically. In his last scene he picks up his son at school and joins his returned wife, a happy reunion shot wordlessly, in soft focus, to syrupy music, in fact, in the style of a tranquilizer commercial. As Ablixa promises to reclaim your tomorrow he has reclaimed his past, through his obsessive campaign.

As all these characters are defined in shades of grey, the victim proving perpetrator, the innocent proving guilty and the guilty innocent, Soderbergh has pulled off the classic Hitchcock joke. In fact, this may supplant Stanley Donen’s Charade as The Best Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Drugs and their dangerous side effects are not the film’s topic but its Macguffin, the gimmick needed to set off the plot mechanics but of little central concern. Soderbergh tipped his hand with his opening shot. A camera soars through the sky to a large building where it centers on a single window -- like the opening of Psycho. From Hitchcock too comes Soderbergh’s careful colour scheme, predominantly grey and concrete, the dullness we escape via drugs -- and films.