by tt stern-enzi

In reality, after a filmmaking burst beginning in 2011 with Contagion and Haywire, Magic Mike in 2012, ending with Side Effects in theaters now and Behind the Candelabra to come on television, Steven Soderbergh seems intent on rivaling the final mythic effort of John Henry. Of course, this is all because Soderbergh has famously reported that Side Effects will be his last work and testament on the big screen, but personally I wonder, perhaps jadedly if this isn’t one of those epic retirement announcements we’ve experienced recently that led to an even more epic attempt at a comeback (think Michael Jordan, Jay-Z). Soderbergh doesn’t seem the type to create that kind of hype and hysteria though. For instance, just look at the decided lack of fanfare greeting his swan song’s opening weekend; this despite the presence of a bevy of intriguingly recognizable faces – Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But, you see, there’s another world, the reel world where Soderbergh, Peter Andrews (his cinematographic alter ego), and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns imagine themselves as the dark halves of David Fincher, scripter Steven Zaillian, and deceased novelist Stieg Larsson (author of The Millennium Trilogy) and Side Effects is actually not Soderbergh’s final film, but the first chapter in this alternate take on that trilogy and the next two parts have already been filmed and are waiting to be released. Or maybe the follow-up installments haven’t been shot yet, but it hardly matters because Soderbergh can knock them out faster at an individual rate than any filmmaker and studio that would go to the effort of shooting back-to-back.

This idea – of Side Effects as a squinty-eyed version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – it has legs, and arms and hands with a mighty strong grip. The girl, in this case, is Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a slightly withdrawn young woman whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum) awaits the end of a prison term for insider trading. Emily stood by her man – and there was a fleeting reference for me to Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere, which much more fully explored the dilemma of wife in limbo – with quiet grace, but it isn’t long before we see signs of unraveling at the edges. Soderbergh (Andrews) frames have a clinical, washed out feel that is always just a shade out of focus and searching for the center. Emily frets over what to wear for Martin’s release and then struggles to connect with him during their first moments of intimacy. Martin seeks to console her, telling her that he’s already making contacts in order to get them back to the financial security they once had.

But we know it is already too late for her. She drives her car into a wall in a parking garage and ends up in the care of Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), an overly eager psychiatrist caught up in the hustle and bustle of life. He immediately begins to prescribe drugs to offset a diagnosis of depression. The perspective shifts, a bit, to Banks and his situation – a new wife (Vinessa Banks), an unemployed financial analyst with a son from a previous marriage. Banks slips a pill or two to his wife to help her take the edge off before she heads into an interview.

And so Side Effects starts to reveal itself. It is about the drugs that we take in order to cope with life and the slow realization that with this form of treatment, there’s nothing but side effects. I know it would appear that there is little in what I’ve described so far that speaks to the alternative action and defiant kink of Dragon Tattoo, but this issue of social medicine and its impact on individuals would be right up Larsson’s alley. He would, without doubt, dress it up in several layers of conspiracy and danger, and through all of that, Emily would emerge out of the unfocused fog as a dark avenging angel.

The funny thing is Soderbergh and Burns flip the script and, after a shocking turn, end up giving audiences something astonishingly close to that scenario. Emily comes across like a structurally unsound levee that breaks under the weight of a perfect storm of medications with competing and conflicting side effects and the fallout drags Banks down as well. He signed on to work with a new drug study (with a $50,000 incentive package dangling before him) and when Emily’s world shatters, tragically and publically, Banks turns crusader, to clear both their names and to uncover the truth.

Truth becomes a slippery commodity, the further Banks goes and it is apparent, from the start, that he’s not the principled hero that Larsson gave us in crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig in Fincher’s remake), but it’s worth pointing out that Blomkvist was also a stand-in Larsson himself. Soderbergh and Burns don’t appear to be concerned with offering up noble paragons. Their reel world is oddly rooted in the dark and murky politics of our own times.

What’s particularly chilling here, and a fitting link to Dragon Tattoo, is the presence of Mara who, after capturing our attention albeit briefly in The Social Network before turning the neat trick of making audiences forget the powerfully magnetic performance of Noomi Rapace from the original Swedish trilogy while earning an Academy Award nomination for her Lisbeth Salander, has embraced a female character type that marries fragile physicality with sharp intelligence and a heart that’s not afraid to explore dark psychological corners.

So much of what happens in Side Effects depends on what, for any other actress, would seem to be wide and wild emotional (and plot-driven) swings, but Mara refuses to volley back and forth from scene to scene. She walks, rather giving into the desire to feverishly sprint, through the story and that decision grounds the narrative.

Of course, it is not accurate to lay all the credit at the feet of Mara because, from start to finish, Side Effects is a Soderbergh film, which is not so simple a designation. Rather than standing out as a traditional auteur, Soderbergh has displayed a creative restlessness that has driven him to jump from genre to genre based on a whim. And that is what we will miss the most; if this is indeed his last film. It could be argued that this will definitely not be the last creative endeavor from him. That’s quite likely and if the case, an encouraging thought because he will certainly transfer his artistic and thoroughly modern sensibilities to whatever canvas presents itself to him and we will all be the better for it.