Steven Soderbergh’s latest, possibly last, theatrical venture, Side Effects, is one of his most thrilling works. This is less because the film is billed as, and occasionally quite effective, as a thriller than the manner in which Soderbergh constantly redefines the focus, parameters and even genre of the film. While it largely remains a thriller throughout, the unseen forces powering the tension shift.
An ostensible Big Pharma rant morphs into something more insidious and uncomfortable, focusing on the characters themselves as identities are fleshed out, erased, backed up and coldly contradicted. This dramatic expansion occurs on the back of a downright Hitchcockian upheaval, and it is perhaps that link to the Master of Suspense that, most of all, makes Side Effects so redolent of the work of Brian De Palma.
Soderbergh’s thriller especially recalls De Palma’s 2002 feature Femme Fatale, another thriller that gradually becomes less about its myriad twists and turns than what its constant shifts in perspective reveal about the archetype embedded in the film’s title. Both movies play their genres against themselves, using fake-outs, multiple identities and the sense of constant surveillance to undermine conventions and perceptions.
In Femme Fatale, De Palma, routinely castigated as a misogynist, puts one of the most reductive gender types in cinema under a microscope. To be sure, though, De Palma does not make his intentions immediately clear: Rebecca Romijn’s Laure Ash goes places in the first minutes of this movie that Soderbergh will only put Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones through at the end of Side Effects.
Yet if his protagonist still connives, swindles and seduces, she also does so within the context of rampantly misogynistic behavior she encounters from nearly everyone. The leader of the gang for whom she works practically never addresses her without “bitch” somewhere in a sentence, and the violence borne out against her feels that much more vicious because the men cannot stand that a woman has deceived them.
The question of how gender affects a man’s treatment of a character likewise comes up in Side Effects, after the focus shifts part of the way into the film from Mara’s depressed, drugged maybe-killer to Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), the psychiatrist who prescribed her the antidepressants that may or may not have driven her to kill her husband (Channing Tatum). A colleague calls Banks’ treatment of Mara’s Emily into question, asking if he would have treated this person the same were she a man.
Banks seems to interpret the question as a hint of possible intimacy (which the narrative will soon suggest in its own ways), but its broader implications hit home: would he have allowed burly Tatum to go straight home without psychiatric evaluation after a suicide attempt instead of his innocent-looking, waifish wife? This lapse in clear-headed judgment brings severe consequences down upon the well-meaning doctor, just as Antonio Banderas’ character in Femme Fatale, who sees himself as the gallant figure who can save Laure, comes under fire only slightly less than the more overtly sexist men of the film.
Where the films differ is in their respective thematic ends. As has been said, Femme Fatale targets its central archetype as a form of genre critique, arguing for the type’s reductiveness as a product of various forms of sexism, male gazes and the like. Side Effects, though it too dabbles in generic deconstruction, comments on broader filmmaking properties (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s piece on “workflow” as a vital new component of digital filmmaking certainly applies to the ever-shifting parameters of the film’s narrative) as well as changing ways of life. Soderbergh’s devious characters can fool others with greater verisimilitude but find their acts to be more untenable.
That which helps establish so many false identities can also be used to out people with shocking speed. Digital enhances both truth and lies, as seen in a shot of an HDTV that looks like it still has the Best Buy floor settings on it. In it, a morning show debate attempts to bring clarity to its topic but could also spread biased misinformation. Like Laure, Jonathan Banks soon finds his Self defined by everyone else, mostly to his detriment. When he shouts, “I want my life back,” the unsettling truth may be that it no longer belongs to him.
