Less Than Effective

I doubt it will come as a surprise when I say that the movie I waited three months to see wasn't worth waiting for. I'm talking about Side Effects, the film Netflix sent me three months and one home address ago. The idea of the movie turned out to be considerably better than the movie itself.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Side Effects stars Rooney Mara as a woman in the grip of depression as her husband (Channing Tatum) is released from prison after serving a sentence for insider trading. She ends up in therapy with a psychiatrist (Jude Law), who upon the recommendation of her former psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones), puts her on a new drug. The drug proves effective, save for the side effect that it causes sleepwalking. And what the woman winds up doing in her sleep turns the story in a very dark direction.

I think Side Effects is a real case study in how important it is for a movie to have a good script -- not that that really needs to be proven. By the time the movie had wrapped up, I found it very similar in tone and plot to one of my favorites, Malice. Both movies have solid casts (though Malice has the "deeper bench" of supporting actors). Side Effects has the better director in Steven Soderbergh, who definitely heightens the tension with his camera work. But Malice has a script by Aaron Sorkin, and I feel that makes the difference.

Side Effects tries to tell a story of wheels within wheels, and as fun as the idea of nested double-crosses is, none of it is as compelling as I think the core plot would have been if played straight: that a woman does something horrible under the influence of an experimental drug. By the time the movie has dropped in a lesbian subplot seemingly just for titillation, I was definitely feeling disappointed about the promising start slowly thrown away.

I give Side Effects a C+. Though not a disaster by any means, it's hard to see what it was about this script in particular that made Steven Soderbergh put off the retirement he keeps threatening.