The Place Beyond the Pines

Derek Cianfrance’s epic strikes an old-fashioned romantic note about how one’s character is shaped by DNA and destiny. 

The three-part structure is classic form. The Thesis is the wild, egotistic life of the daredevil motorcyclist, Luke (Ryan Gosling). The Antithesis is the supposedly hero cop, Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a law graduate who prefers the adrenaline of police work and eventually reformist politics. In his good citizenry he turns against the benefits of corruption in the force. This stand makes him another loner, but in contrast to Luke’s rootlessness. 

Luke and Avery are more alike than their surface differences suggest. Blonde Luke is laced with tattoos, while the lawyer cop is dark and clean. Luke didn’t know his father; Avery’s is a retired judge who can advise him when he needs. When Avery kills Luke both have matching wives and one-year-old sons. But from then on their likeness trumps their difference. The survivor Avery can’t shake the memory of the life he Crossed. His conscience keeps Luke’s family photo in Avery’s wallet and leads him to spring Luke’s son Jason (Dane DeHaan) from jail. Ultimately, though, the winners (the Crosses) win and the losers (Luke, Jason) lose. And so it goes, from generation to generation, though Cianfrance valorizes Jason’s flight. 

In the Synthesis the two men’s sons clash. Cianfrance clearly prefers the jerk Luke over the responsible citizen Avery, so Jason kicks over the traces of the stable, loving life his mother and his adoptive father gave him and chooses to live out his father’s dashing folly. He buys a bike and -- apparently having inherited the motorcycle gene -- heads out for The Place Beyond the Pines. Like all American adventurers, that’s westward. But the place beyond the pines  is beyond not just the city and the loner mechanic’s trailer trash life. It’s beyond nature, beyond the physical environment, that elusive inner peace. Cianfrance’s romantic naivete finds satisfaction in the stoner loner’s fleeing his family for ... the rebel’s delusion of independence. 

Paradoxically, it’s Avery’s son AJ (Emory Cohen), not Jason, who has the thick-lipped petulance of Marlon Brando’s rebel motorcyclist in The Wild One. But AJ’s wildness is just the rich druggie’s delinquency, which he finally gives up to support his father’s campaign for office. Jason is the real rebel. But first, in another place beyond the pines, he compels Avery to realize his love for his son and to admit and to apologize for having orphaned Jason. In the old debate between Nature and Nurture, Cianfrance simply chooses Nature as the dominant force. As Luke’s absent father launched Luke’s solitude, son Jason opts for his absent father’s course, not the model provided by his very substantial adoptive father Kofi (Mahershala Ali).  

Much of this long film is encapsulated in the opening. The first shot is a long track that follows Luke from his bare chested solitary ritual preparations out to his public performance. Over two hours later that shot is echoed when Jason is tracked from behind as he walks in school, feeling the first stirrings of his father’s spirit. In both the individual track and in their parallel the point is continuity, an uninterrupted movement, like the passage of character from even an absent father to son. A second form of this continuity is the consequences of one’s action. Thus a playful one-night stand leads to Romina’s (Eva Mendes) pregnancy, the eventual discovery of which leads to Luke’s leaving the romantic life of the circus for ... the romantic life of the bank robber and the mythic shadow across his son’s life.

Perhaps the film’s key symbol is Luke’s circus act. He and two other cyclists are locked in a huge open steel mesh ball in which they speed up and around the sides narrowly avoiding collision. In that artificial, closed world Luke is triumphant. But in the outside real world the speeding trips intersect and the lives collide and crash. Outside the ball he goes too far, ruining his hopes to win back Romina, trying one bank job too many, dying in a bathetic fall from a window.   

Phil Spector

David Mamet’s HBO film Phil Spector is less about the famous Wall of Sound producer than about Mamet himself, the screenwriter and director. It’s his general vision not a historical document. Indeed Mamet admits as much in his disclaimer: "This is a work of fiction. It's not 'based on a true story.' It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon on the trial or its outcome." Yeah, right.

Of course the film presents Al Pacino’s very persuasive interpretation of Spector. The film also draws the broad outline of the trial and in a postscript its conclusion. Spoiler alert: Spector is in jail. But if we set the facts of that character and the trial aside, if we take the film as Mamet’s meditation, then it is clearly about a few themes beyond Spector’s case.

The primary theme is Mamet’s familiar reaction against liberal right-think. He demonstrates the liberal’s reflexive assumption that the woman must be the innocent victim, the powerful man must be the killer, especially if the woman is poor and the man is rich. Against this kneejerk and righteous bias any scientific evidence has no effect. Mamet makes this point by tracing the conversion of lawyer Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren) from assuming Spector was guilty to appreciating there is at least an unreasonable doubt of his guilt. With Talmudic rigour Mamet calls for the rich to be accorded the same justice as the poor. 

So must the freakish. Hence the lunacy and outrageous egotism, dress and hair of Mamet’s Spector. However violent the character may have been in the past, however crazy his affect may seem, however rampaging his egotism, none of that proves him guilty of the trial’s particular charge. Again, the ballistic science must be paid its due. Here Mamet's Spector joins the long line of respectable crazies he cites, from Lenny Bruce to Jimi Hendrix to the pre-Yoko bald hermit John Lennon. To these free spirited eccentrics justice must be paid.

Finally, the film coheres with Mamet’s controversial recent defense of the present gun “regulation” in America. As he recently argued, if the president can have armed guards for his children, why shouldn’t ordinary citizens? In this film Mamet discourages the assumption that a man who owns guns in necessarily responsible for any fatal mishaps they may cause. It also defends the apparently unbalanced -- in this case the creative -- against prejudgment. 

As one character remarks about the complexity of layers in a Spector musical production, “The truth is somewhere in the mix.” Don‘t go to this film for any truth about Spector and his failed date and the trial. True to the dynamic of fiction, Mamet’s subject is about the larger interplay of elements of which the Spector history may or may not be one instance. His subject is the prejudice by which even -- or rather, particularly -- the righteous can blind themselves to any alternative reality. That can preclude justice. 

Full disclosure. Despite the fact I’m a self-respecting liberal who finds it hard to agree with anything Mamet proposes, I have to respect the power of his writing, his ear for dialogue, his eye for metaphor, and his masterful direction of his powerhouse cast here.     

Stoker

In Chan-Wook Park’s Stoker the exercise of evil admits no possibility of innocence. As the title evokes the author of Dracula, the four central characters --  dead father Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney), widow/mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), their daughter India (Mia Wasikowska) and Richard’s younger brother Charlie (Mathew Goode) -- have a vampirish pallor themselves and suck the innocence out of everyone around them. 

Even the apparently virtuous characters are enthralled to the evil ones. The housekeeper (Phyllis Somerville) has been in Charlie’s subversive service. Whip (Alden Ehrenreich), the boy who saves India from the school brutes, tries to rape her. Aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver) has sheltered Evelyn  from the truth of Charley’s institutionalizing until it’s too late to warn her. A couple of apparently spritely Phillip Glass piano duets turn out to be the girl’s orgasmic fantasy. 

The film’s connection to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is obvious, incidental and crucial. A traumatized teen with a preternatural connection to her visiting uncle  -- okay, he’s a psychopathic killer, but family’s family. Instead of Hitchcock’s charming Smalltown USA, here the main action is in a remote country estate. The gullible merry widow is not some bejewelled vain crone but our elegant Nicole, who very quickly falls for her dead husband’s young and unknown brother. And we watch the sympathetic young heroine grow into a serial killer.

In fact Hitchcock’s shadow is wider. The dead father’s taxidermy, the intrusive mother, the horrific splendour of the mansion, the two shower scenes, the highway cop in dehumanizing shades, Charley’s Batesian pose alone on the horizon, all evoke Psycho. But where in both films Hitchcock shows the innocent confronting evil, perhaps catching it, but (some) surviving, Park’s vision is of an irreversible evil that nothing can stop. In Park’s conclusion the bodies aren’t dug up and the killer identified to the cops. The killer gets away with it and in the last murder gratuitously kills the sheriff. As India's father used to say, "Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse." Doing something good seems ultra vares. 

The whole story represents the mentality of the heroine, who ultimately turns out to be even crazier than her moron schoolmates think she is. At first she seems to be the familiar supersensitive high school girl, too pure for the dominant louts. She -- like Kidman -- commands our sympathy and identification. But with Charley’s arrival India unfolds. At first she instinctively recoils from him. She submits in the scene where she loses her innocence, both sexually and morally. 
     After seeing Charley embracing her mother, India runs off to find young Whip. When Whip rapes her, Charley appears and kills him. (Of course, Whip’s name seems to doom him to Charley’s belt, though -- I gather --garrotting is worse than a whipping.) India helps Charley bury Whip and declines to turn him in. Even after she learns his letters were written from a mental institution and he killed her father, she is ready to run off to New York with him. Why she finally kills Charley we don’t know -- and perhaps she doesn’t either -- whether it’s to preserve herself from his command or to save her mother (whom she immediately abandons). 
     India proves more frightening than Charley because throughout her unraveling she doesn’t change her mien, tone, dress, behaviour, until the very end. Stabbing the boy with her pencil is as sharp as turning the shears on the sheriff’s jugular. But the second stabbing is premeditated; she speeds to attract his attention. She is now actively evil. In contrast to India’s stolidity, Charley shows a wide range of affect, emotion, pretense, even frenzy. In the difference India seems more other-worldly, a diabolical spin on the exoticism of her name. 

The story is framed by the pre-title scene and the last. Initially, the super-sentient woman declares maturity to inhere in taking responsibility for what you are, as flowers can’t choose what colour they are. But the flowers that seem naturally red in the first scene are in the last shown to be spattered with the sheriff’s blood. 

India has very clearly been choosing what she will be and do, when she rejects Charley’s friendship, then when she helps conceal his murders. The poetry of her opening monologue is psychotic delusion. The flowers can’t help bearing the colour she contaminated them with. And where Hitchcock’s characters can’t help stumbling into vulnerability or discovering their own moral compromise,  Park’s India may in fact not be responsible for her evil. She may be genetically doomed to her Uncle Charlie’s bad seed. In his first murder, the young lad killed his even younger brother. He now kills the older, Richard, who picks him up at the asylum but won’t let him meet his family. As for India, the troubled victim teen turns into the murderous femme fatale -- when she puts on her first pair of pumps. The annual donor of her birthday shoes, after all, was Uncle Charlie, not her adoring father.

The film is stunning to watch, beautifully composed, as compelling as Milton’s Satan. Of course it has to be, for the representation of a creeping, uncontrollable evil. For the stoker also feeds the fires of hell. As the South Korean director’s first American movie, the exposure of pervasive amorality beneath a slick, seductive, affluent surface makes sense.  In response to this topsy turvy world, Park’s credits scroll from the top of the screen to the bottom, in reverse of the normal.   

Admission

A film starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd sets us up to expect belly-laughs. But in Paul Weitz’s Admission we we get more wit than guffaws -- and more wisdom than both. It's very brave to cast these comic stars in such a cerebral but touching -- and still funny -- film
     The title works three ways. The plot deals with the routine work of the Princeton University admissions office, where a stringent system admits the few successes from a horde of applicants. Thematically, the three central characters grow out of the rigid exclusivity in their personal (i.e., love) lives and admit someone into a new intimacy. Third, that admission recognizes, confesses and addresses their vulnerability. 

Admissions officer Portia (Tina Fey) thinks she’s happy in her efficient live-in relationship with English prof Mark (Michael Sheen). But in bed he reads Chaucer to her. As they host his department party he announces he is leaving her for a famous Virginia Woolf specialist, who’s carrying his twins (you know, A Womb of Her Own?).  Portia has to overcome both her professional and romantic commitments to admit John Pressman (Paul Rudd). She's so used to excluding, rejecting, people that at one point her cheek is branded with the word "Deny."

She also has to overcome the cold feminist ardor of her mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin), whose aversion to men allowed only the one-night stand that conceived Portia.   Susannah embodies female independence, from the Bella Abzug tattoo on her bicep, to building her own bike, to the First Wave poster that declares a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. When she’s seduced by Russian professor Polokov (Olek Krupa), however, she’s converted from kale eater to grinding out and fondling her own phallic sausage.

Even the apparently most liberated character, John Pressman, the director of an experimental high school, has to learn to make further admissions. He fled his wealthy, starched family for the vagabond life of the international do-gooder. But his roving is as compulsive, inhibiting and isolating as Portia’s self-denying 15 years in the Princeton office. He comes to admit the greater needs and desires of his adopted son Nelson (Travaris Spears).That cancels John’s trip to Ecuador and promises a relationship with Portia.

Portia’s second admission is to acknowledge that she had a son that she gave up for adoption, who might be the offbeat prodigy Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) she now finagles into admission to Princeton. Jeremiah’s candidacy breaks down both her personal and her professional strictures. Admitting him into her life costs her her job. Even when she loses Jeremiah she retains the prospect of some time meeting her lost son. But her key growth here is in admitting she had a son and that she yearns to meet him. She faces a truth and possible relationship that she had long denied. 

The film is as funny as it is poignant. The humour is sly and observational. In her fastidiousness Portia snips her bonzai tree down to nothing, then fixates on the social worker’s tree at her own interview later. The Tomlin and Wally Shawn characters and Pressman’s mother are fully fleshed out in incidental details and ironies. The hilarity is a matter of wit, not guffaw, but it’s there and it serves the wisdom in Portia's name and in Jeremiah's monologue of the various mythic goddesses of wisdom..

Indeed, this obviously liberal film still questions a variety of liberal assumptions, such as by the letter feminism, the complacency of do-gooders both in the experimental school and in the international arena, the restrictive liberties in open relationships, and especially parent-child issues. Every child and every parent in this film is working out a problem between them. 

Dead Man Down

Like Hamlet, Niels Arden Opley’s first foray into American film is a revenge tragedy. Rising gangster Victor (Colin Farrell) seeks vengeance upon the honcho who had Victor’s wife and little daughter killed, Alphonse (Terrence Howard). Victor infiltrates Alphonse’s gang and bumps off the hood who twigs to his real identity. Meanwhile Victor both watches and is watched by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a mysterious, scarred young woman who lives in the high rise opposite his. She coerces Victor into killing the drunk driver who got off lightly for ruining her face and life. 

Like Hamlet, Victor -- whose name is really Laszlo, but whom we’ll still call Victor -- delays killing Alphonse, indeed even saves his life. He wants to set up a situation where can he also off Alphonse’s Albanian gunsels who killed Lazslo’s wife and thought they buried Laszlo too.  

In the pre-title scene, Victor’s friend/colleague Darcy (Dominic Cooper) holds his baby and waxes on about the need not to be alone and about the heart’s capacity to heal. This prepares for the film’s major shift from revenge tragedy to hopeful romance. Victor and Beatrice undermine each other’s revenge plan, out of their growing emotional commitment to each other. She prevents his suicidal bombing of Alpohonse and the Albanians. He only hurts the drunk driver she wanted killed. This double softening enables them to leave the underworld and rather ride the underground to love in the last scene. As the pre-title scene prefigures not just the leads' self-healing but Darcy’s decision not to kill Victor and Beatrice, it parallels the dumb show that precedes the play Hamlet commissions to expose Claudius’s guilt. 

When the taped little daughter expresses her confidence that “Daddy will handle the monster,” the ironic reference seems to be to Alphonse. But it turns out to be the monster of cold, murderous vengeance in Victor himself. As the film sees vengeance as  self-destructive, in the final shoot-out Victor kills a respectable number of gunsels in self-defense, but his two primary targets, Alphonse and the Albanian gang leader, kill each other in one exchange. Alphonse avenges his henchman’s murder and the Albanian his brother’s, so they miss the salvation Victor and Beatrice find in each other when they step out of the vicious circle of revenge. As the plot is driven by the various characters’ drive to avenge, we don’t see any cops in this film. It’s all personal. 

Alphonse is dramatically isolated. In his fabulous mansion -- deliciously destroyed in the finale -- there is no sign of anyone living with him. He eats alone, as when he ominously summons Victor to bring him a late-night snack. In contrast, Beatrice’s mother Valentine (Isabelle Huppert) insists on giving Victor her freshly baked cookies and lemon chicken dish (that it turns out Beatrice has been romantically cooking for him instead). Here food is community, connection, an emblem of how Beatrice and Victor will save each other. Midway between Alphonse’s solitude and Valentine’s warm community, Victor gives his Albanian prisoner false hopes by feeding him a granola bar.   

Beatrice’s scars are an emblem for the other characters’ damage, Alphonse’s by the dehumanizing success of his criminal “bad eminence,” Victor’s  by his single-minded drive to avenge his loss rather than make a new life, Valentine’s deafness. With her cheery, generous spirit Valentine personifies Darcy’s remark that the afflicted can heal themselves. Darcy narrowly averts Alphonse’s fate and preserves his domestic, humane values, when after  helping to set up Victor he eschews shooting him. He chooses this relationship over the gang. The apparently redundant title suggests that if a dead man can still be downed, he can still be brought back to life, as the emotionally stunted Victor, Beatrice and finally Darcy forego vengeance to recover their humanity. 

When Beatrice and Victor meet across their respective high rises they are defined as detached isolates. The first slow pan across the gap between them pronounces the distance they will have to traverse to connect. If their first connection is over murder plans, their final is for the more fulfilling love. As her name -- and white dress -- evokes Dante’s idealized love, Beatrice saves Victor from infernal vengeance and makes Lazslo a victor beyond his expectations. 

Two other contexts are summoned up in the film. The vicious brat gang in Beatrice’s neighborhood suggest a society without innocence, without sympathy, a correlative to both heroes’ vengeful bent. The director and lead Rapace also carry associations from their previous collaboration, the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Though Rapace draws on her persona of strength, will and resourcefulness, this film transcends the earlier value of vengeance to provide a more optimistic, romantic and thereby perhaps more American, resolution. When the film closes on a Hungarian song, it returns Victor to Laszlo, restored to his more honorable engineer and with a new love and life ahead. The dead man is down and the living lover reborn.

Silver Linings Playbook

     Silver Linings Playbook reminds us how much weight a conventional Hollywood genre can bear, if you trust it. By the Romantic Comedy conventions, two attractive young people meet “cute”, i.e., with instinctive mutual dislike, then overcome the obstacles to romantic fulfillment at the end. In the classic theatre comedy, the young sexual energies that may threaten to disrupt the social order are instead harnessed to renew it through the ritual of marriage.

     The film refreshens the genre in several ways. Its romantic heroes both have clinical psychological disorders, with self-destructive, even violent, impulses. But both are suffering from the loss of their life mates. Pat (Bradley Cooper) was institutionalized after beating up his high school teaching colleague he caught in the shower with wife Nikki (Brea Bee). Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) is a recovering sex addict whose husband died -- coincidentally, after she’d lost sexual interest in him. The seriousness of their respective losses encourages our acceptance, even identification, with these unusual romantic leads. 

     Part of the film’s brilliance lies in its realistic depiction of these troubled psyches, with their rampaging highs and lows. Part lies in the witty, complex dialogue. Within a speech, even within a sentence, a character will swerve between extremes in sentiment, desire, self-understanding, outreach and retreat. 

     As the film embraces as normal troubled characters we might feel to be some Other, it finds reflection in the more socially acceptable community. Pat’s father (Robert de Niro) is obsessive/compulsive about his gambling on football games. Pat’s mother (named sadly) Dolores (Jacki Weaver) mutely cares for both Pats, father and son, accepting both men’s irrational behaviour and her own quiet role in life. Pat Sr’s predicament -- forced by the loss of his job to run a bookie operation -- typifies the new American socio-economic reality. His superstitious need to have Pat Jr present for the Eagles game is reversed by Tiffany’s reverse argument. Such compulsions and rituals are at best irrational security blankets, at worst destructive. As she ultimately wins Pat Jr by doing something crazier than him, she first wins over Pat Sr by rejigging his superstition about the Eagles games. In both cases she respects and addresses their nature. 

     The film’s climax involves Pat Sr’s bet on an NFL game and the dance contest Tiffany has entered with Pat Jr. The football game is an emblem of America’s obsession with the violent, win-at-all-costs, neo-religion (rooted in Sunday but creeping out throughout the week), the NFL. The dance is the more intimate teamwork, two partners, yet another exercise in physical grace that has been turned into competition. When the big bet requires Pat and Tiffany to score only five out of ten the film rejects the sport’s absolute requirement to win and accepts the couple’s doing their best. By implication, “good enough” is the healthy standard for people with or without mental or physical challenges. 

     Making Pat’s doctor, Cliff Patel (Anupam Kher), an East Indian who is also an eager Eagles fan provides another example of an Other joining the mainstream society. Normally a therapist should not become personally engaged with a patient, but Dr Patel enters Pat’s outside world via the socially respectable madness of football fandom. His enthusiasm shows the sense of community that transcends barriers, cultural, ethnic, professional. Philadelphia is, after all, the city of brotherly love. This title is challenged when racists attack Dr Patel at the game but reaffirmed when Pat and his friends fight to protect him.  

     Throughout this romance nothing plays out in the conventional way. When Pat compliments Tiffany’s appearance he immediately adds that he’s practicing to be more attentive to his wife, whom he didn’t compliment enough. When Tiffany says “You’re not a standup guy today, Pat,” she viscerally knows the vicissitudes of someone’s character and moods. She is the more understanding of the two. When Pat says he thinks she’s the worst thing that ever happened to him, she easily responds: “Of course you do. Let’s dance.” Their labored practice for the competition plays against the tradition of Fred Astaire courting his Ginger Rogers characters through an elegant dance. However sordid her recent past and her language, she has fought through to the most self-awareness and self-acceptance in the film: “There’s always going to be a part of me that’s sloppy and dirty, but I like that. With all the other parts of myself.” (Pat’s mother tacitly lives out another kind of acceptance.) The couple panic when they find themselves holding hands: 

Pat: Wait, what’s this?

Tiffany: I thought you were doing it.

Pat: I thought you were doing it.

As the dance practice and performance lead them to realize their love, each is manipulating the other, Tiffany with her forged letter from Nikki, Pat by his pretending to believe it. He lied to her for a week because “I was trying to be romantic.” 

     Essentially the film redefines both what’s normal and what’s moral in our society. It undermines our habitual rejection of people who may need drugs, or who have mental or economic problems, or who for whatever reason seem to be an Other we’re inclined to reject. The film establishes a close community within Philadelphia where the Outsider -- whether an obsessive compulsive, a doctor turned green-faced Oriental Eagles fan, a black inmate determined to escape -- can be warmly accepted. Tiffany’s parents nervously keep her semi-tethered  in her own little backyard cottage, but she works out a fuller embrace by Pat and his parents. Tiffany’s love saves Pat from the self-abnegation his obsession with recovering Nikki and his wearing a garbage bag connote. In life as in football you need a gamebook -- strategies, whether behavioral or medicinal -- if you’re going to salvage some silver linings from all the heavy clouds out there and inside.

     The film seems almost European in its language and its confrontation of social and psychological complexity. The tidy wrapping up of all those loose ends may seem like the obligatory American happy ending. But the conclusion fulfills not just the imperatives of the classic genre but the characters’ resilience. This film gives us hope for our troubled and a model for a genuinely warm and integrated community. The characters have earned that resolution.

     

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.