Dial M for Meds

Rooney Mara on the couch in Side Effects.

* * * Side Effects. Written by Scott Z. Burns. Directed by Stephen Soderbergh. 

There’s a good chance you’re already on drugs. More than 10% of all Americans—around 35 million people—were on anti-depressants in 2011. The figure for women between the ages of 40-59 was 20%. And that’s not even counting other sorts of medications, such as ones for cholesterol (still the #1 most prescribed class), painkillers (#3), heart meds (#4), “anti-ulcerants” (#8), tranquillizers (#11), and sedatives (#20). In large part, the medicated nation envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World is already here, except that Huxley was a little naïve to assume there would be only one drug on offer.

            All those drugs and their picturesque side-effects naturally lead to a degree of anxiety. Our word “pharmacology”, after all, is rooted in a Greek word that meant both “remedy” and “poison.” Steven (Ocean’s Eleven, Sex, Lies and Videotape) Soderbergh’s new Side Effects trades deftly in this unease. Or more precisely, it starts to, until it veers off into a standard thriller territory.

            We meet Emily (Rooney Mara) as her husband (Channing Tatum) is about to get out of prison for insider trading. As often happens in these situations, she falls apart emotionally just as her ordeal seems to be ending. Desperately depressed, she turns to Dr. Banks (Jude Law) for help, who puts her on a series of meds to lift her mood. They ultimately hit on a new, not entirely tested drug that seems to help—except for the sleepwalking, sleep-cooking, and—to Dr. Banks’ shock—sleep-murder. The cops find her husband stabbed to death as Emily huddles in bed, unable to remember how he got there.

             The script by Scott Z. Burns (Contagion) sets up this promising premise, and primes it with some delicious complications. The doctor’s judgment, you see, may have been influenced by the fact that he’s being paid $50,000 to “evaluate” the drug, which means prescribing it to patients who might not entirely understand the risks. Banks, meanwhile, starts to have his suspicions about Emily’s story—whether there's more to her depression than it appears. Is he on to something or just rationalizing away his own responsibility?

            One of the possible side-effects of all this chemistry, Burns wants to suggest, is the shifting of responsibility, and therefore of guilt. In this sense Side Effects promises to be a pharmacological update on the classic Hitchcockian thriller, such as The Wrong Man, preoccupied with the question of culpability. But that’s only until the film shifts from being The Wrong Man and becomes Dial M for Murder—that is, to a more or less standard battle of wits between Banks, Emily, and Emily’s former shrink (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

            Not that the battle isn’t entertaining. Without giving away too much, Rooney Mara (who played the title role in the US version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) commands the screen even as she plays it listless and dejected; Jude Law manages to swing from “doing no harm” to toxic avenger without seeming wholly unsympathetic. Neither of these are easy tricks. Soderbergh, one of our most consistently versatile directors, is always in control.

            Yet there’s no escaping the feeling that there was a potentially terrific movie here that contents itself to be merely “good”. As depression goes from stigma to illness to existential condition, there are questions that deserve posing, much less answering. And if intelligent guys like Soderbergh won’t try, who will?

© 2013  Nicholas Nicastro