Special Effects

In theaters Friday: Beautiful Creatures, A Good Day to Die Hard
New on Blu-ray: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Sessions, Skyfall

It’s easy to look at Side Effects and consider the film to be “small.” That’s what many said about Soderbergh’s first feature sex, lies and videotape, too, in 1989, and look how that turned out. That Baton Rouge-set film won Cannes and launched the modern indie film movement in America. So now, at the age of 50, and with just one more film on the way—HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra—the lauded director and former Baton Rougean who has made lavish epics like Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Contagion is retiring as a filmmaker to focus on painting, photography and whatever else a wealthy Oscar winner wants to do.

But first, a tense psych-drama about just what prescription drugs can do to a marriage. Well, sort of. That’s only one dose of the paradigm the filmmaker is exploring here, and since the film’s marketing campaign has done well to veil the picture’s pleasurable twists, I’ll just say that the movie stars Rooney Mara as a mental health patient who relapses into trauma with the return of her husband—a beefy-faced Channing Tatum—from white collar prison and looks to psychologist Jude Law and his bank of prescription medication as her only lifeline. 

Appearing more haggard than suave, watching star Law in this is like watching Jimmy Stewart or Humphrey Bogart in that he is so incredibly excellent at remaining in control of his faculties, even when hell is blazing at his heels. For her part, Mara—here shorn of her piercing, goth-gloomed trappings as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo‘s master hacker Lisbeth Salander—proves to be an unnerving psychological adversary for the doc; her cold, placid face and tangles of brunette hair paint the picture of a young woman both inscrutable and invitingly fractured. It is another fearless performance.

Previously, writer Scott Z. Burns also penned Soderbergh’s 2009 madcap dramedy The Informant! and his 2011 global pandemic drama Contagion—clearly Side Effects’ closest kin among Soderbergh’s diverse canon, not merely for the appearance of Law and proximity of time, but for its deliberate pacing and willful resistance of grandeur in favor of subtlety and nuance, a nearly forgotten attribute among the glittering, wailing wreckage of typical Hollywood fare. This is the kind of modern drama Hitchcock fans will love, and it just might earn Mara her second Oscar nomination.

With an eerie, propulsive score by Thomas Newman (Skyfall) and Soderbergh’s own fluid, lived-in cinematography, Side Effects is a smart, tightly wound thrill-ride exploring the traps of money, ambition and relationships with memorable characters and more than a few left turns. And in that sense, it is Soderbergh’s filmography in digest. The only downside is that, much like Soderbergh’s career, the plot threads of this film are wrapped up in a flash; the curtain falls all too quickly.

And yet, if any deeper meaning is to be extracted from the one phrase that is repeated multiple times throughout Side Effects—“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”—let it be this: Soderbergh may be retiring, but he won’t be gone forever.

Watch a behind-the-scenes featurette and see Law and Mara discuss the film and Soderbergh’s retirement with Peter Travers below: