“Side Effects”

If Side Effects really is Steven Soderbergh’s final film, as he claims, he’s going out in boldly representative fashion. Like so many of his other features, the movie is a well-made nullity: it holds your attention and even demonstrates a fair amount of intelligence and craft, but it lacks that certain something that forces one to care. (Passion? Conviction?) Watching it, I had no idea why Soderbergh had made it–he seems to have no feelings about the material, or about the people onscreen. But then, has he ever? For an anointed auteur, Soderbergh is strangely passionless. He may dig the medium of movies–you get that sense from the interviews he does and from his DVD commentaries–but his approach to making them hasn’t progressed beyond workmanlike. He seems to know everything about how to make a film, nothing about why.

That might sound harsh, but Soderbergh has admitted as much himself. Last year, in an interview with The Playlist about his planned retirement, he copped to being more of a technician than an artist: “I’m better at stuff that’s superficial–craft, filtering, problem solving. [I haven’t made] something that’s just off the chart.” I thought of that comment a few days ago, when asked to respond to a critics’ survey question: “What is Steven Soderbergh’s best film?” I could have answered Out of Sight, maybe, or King of the Hill, or Haywire, but then it occurred to me: the difference between Soderbergh’s best films and his worst–Full Frontal, say, or Ocean’s Twelve, or The Informant!–is almost negligible. Essentially, they’re all make-work projects, and though you may prefer one over another, chances are you don’t feel that strongly about any of them, because he doesn’t put strong feelings into them. Think about it: when’s the last time you heard someone–someone with a bit of moviegoing experience, anyway–name a Soderbergh film as an all-time favourite? How could they? There’s no personal obsession in them, no trace of the sensual possibilities of moviemaking.

There’s an argument to be made that Soderbergh is simply a successor to accomplished craftsmen like John Ford and Howard Hawks, but those guys knew, almost unfailingly, how to give audiences what they wanted. As Side Effects demonstrates, Soderbergh isn’t always so adept. The movie begins one way–as a slow-build thriller about the dangers and enticements of prescription drugs–then, about two thirds of the way through, morphs into something else entirely. A mid-film shift can work beautifully–Psycho being the classic example–but the shift has to make you think: damn, this is the movie I should have wanted! When Side Effects shifts, everything that had been interesting in it falls away, leaving a cockamamie and oddly out-of-fashion psychosexual thriller à la Basic Instinct or Sliver.

Prior to that point, I had been enjoying Scott Z. Burns’s script for the way it digs (even if only shallowly) into the specifics of the prescription drug trade. As one of the characters casually informs us, almost 50 per cent of Americans take some sort of behind-the-counter drug, and yet the subject has rarely been tackled by filmmakers. For awhile, Burns (who also wrote Soderbergh’s The Informant! and Contagion) genuinely grapples with the possibility (probability?) that doctors are over-prescribing, and that America is slowly turning into a nation of zombies. Plus, he drops in so many references to real-life anxiety meds–Wellbutrin, Prozac, Effexor, Zoloft, etc.–and their unwanted side effects that the movie begins to take on a pleasing group-therapy quality. Audiences can nod along in recognition, then compare notes afterward on the pick-me-ups they’ve tried.

As the severely anxious young woman who becomes addicted to a (fictitious) designer drug called Ablixa, Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) has the right tense, glassy look. Though we don’t know precisely where the movie is going at the outset, we can tell from her smooth, taut face that chaos looms just below the surface. As her husband, a financial advisor newly released from prison for insider trading, Channing Tatum doesn’t have much to do; he’s just an embodiment of soulless capitalist striving, and the presumed source of Mara’s burbling anxiety. The film’s true lead is Jude Law as Mara’s doctor. By turning an obviously fragile young woman into a guinea pig for a new drug, he could have been the film’s villain, but instead he’s its compromised protagonist, overwhelmed by guilt for a tragedy partly of his own making. Basically, it’s the Michael Douglas role: the self-satisfied rich guy undone by hubris, and it suits the imperiously handsome Law quite well.

But then comes that aforementioned shift, and with it the realization that Soderbergh and Burns had no intention of exploring the issues they raise. You could excuse this as an innocent blunder, but it fits too well with Soderbergh’s characteristic indifference. If he’d cared more about the material, he’d presumably have realized what a letdown the film’s latter half is, and maybe even encouraged Burns to rethink it. In a way, it’s he who’s the zombie, not the Mara character. He wanders from film to film, going through the motions, unaware his heart no longer beats. Taking a break from directing might be just the thing he needs–maybe he’ll return with the blood flowing, finally.

“Tchoupitoulas”

If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary this week, head directly to the Bloor Cinema for Tchoupitoulas. The movie is a wee thing, but it’s a shot of pure cinematic bliss. Directors Bill and Turner Ross train their camera on three boys wandering the streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter after dark, taking in the sights and sounds. (Tchoupitoulas is one of the city’s major thoroughfares.) That’s the whole premise, and if you can get on the filmmakers’ wavelength, they cast a deeply entrancing spell. The movie reawakens memories of your own first solo excursions into the world, when the nighttime activities of adults felt new and impossibly enticing. The central scenario, incidentally, is a fiction, but the boys were unscripted and the encounters un-staged. It’s what used to be called “Free Cinema,” and it follows in the footsteps of classics like Louisiana Story and On the Bowery. These sorts of “controlled” docs haven’t been much in fashion lately, but they’re making a small, welcome comeback. (Another, Only the Young, screens at the Bloor this week, too.) Tchoupitoulas–so lovely and freewheeling–makes more straightforward, “authentic” docs look dowdy by comparison.

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