Harmless Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh has been talking about retiring from making feature films and there is speculation that Side Effects will be his last film. Seems he will be moving on to television and other artistic ventures. Soderbergh is a good filmmaker and will certainly be a boost to television. It might be a medium that fits his style more.  Not to say he hasn’t made some good films. He has won prestigious awards for some, including the Palme D’Or for Sex, Lies and Videotapes and a Best Director Academy Award for Traffic – quite his best films in this cinephile’s opinion.  But he has made many more films that, while entertaining and good money makers, are really pretty innocuous. Films like the Ocean’s trilogy, Contagion, Magic Mike, and others that, while entertaining, are also quite forgettable.  A great film auteur he is not.

This is not to be taken to mean that Side Effects is a bad or boring movie. It is entertaining, well-constructed and Jude Law is great in it. But it is also a movie that just skims the surface of some very serious issues like mental illness, the ethics of psychiatrists and pharmaceuticals, marital relationships, without delving into any of them emotionally or even rationally. Things end up being quite implausible, which is kind of a characteristic of many of his films. The main characters in Side Effects are all exceptionally beautiful and their situations and lives quite distant from most of ours (who would be so horribly dissatisfied and resentful to “end up” in a nice Manhattan apartment, working at a New York ad agency?). Soderbergh keeps them at a distance, because that’s his style, the characters in his movies are quite flat. So while it’s fun to watch them, there is really no empathizing or feeling with them. They basically don’t ring true. (How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?)

 

Side Effects certainly holds some interesting twists and turns, but it leaves you wishing that the director had not turned so much and gone deeper into some of those tough issues we face today. It ends up as a good murder mystery with gorgeous people (who wouldn’t keep going to sessions with psychiatrists Jude Law and Katherine Zeta-Jones?). So: fun to watch and “easy on the eye”, but that’s it. And maybe that’s why Soderbergh is turning to television.