Steven Soderbergh’s thriller begins with the shot of blood on a kitchen floor, then flashes back three months. This lets the viewer know that the depression saga that follows will turn into more of a thriller eventually. Wait out the beginning, with Rooney Mara as the morose spouse of a Wall Street trader (Channing Tatum, star of Soderbergh’s previous movie, Magic Mike) whose four-year insider-trading sentence is about to end and Jude Law as her pharma-peddling therapist. The first 20 minutes might outdo Silver Linings Playbook for the number of references to pyschotropic drugs, real and fake. Some other time, Soderbergh might have made an exposé of the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry encourages psychiatrists to medicate their patients. (The good doctor is being paid $50,000 as a “consultant” for enrolling patients in one study.) But this is a thriller, even if it looks like a docudrama for awhile, especially the courtroom scene, which seems dully realistic.
Written by Scott Z Burns, also credited with Soderbergh’s Contagion and The Informant, Side Effects comes to seem undeniably contrived, but increasingly watchable if you don’t mind none of the characters being especially ingratiating. Catherine Zeta-Jones seems oddly flat as another therapist, but Law’s is the primary character. He watches his life unravel after what seems to be a small error in judgment, and fights back. Thorny ethical questions, lying at the junction of medicine and law, are suggested, but not explored. Quiet suspense will have to suffice. And remember, ordinary criminals will stab you in the back, but professionals use more subtle weapons.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/13 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/23/13
No comments:
Post a Comment