SIDE EFFECTS

The new Steven Soderbergh thriller Side Effects is one of those films that's difficult to discuss without ruining the thing, but let me just say, if what we're told by the ending is true, than why did she buy that sail boat, and just who was was the third place setting for?

Emily (Rooney Mara) is depressed and she has reason to be. Her husband (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison for insider trading. She's having trouble adjusting. At home, at work, with friends, she's just going through the motions.

Soon she finds herself in the care of Dr. Banks (Jude Law) who puts her on a series of anti-depressants, but none of them are working. Banks meets with one of Emily's old doctors (Cathrine Zeta-Jones) who slyly suggests the a new drug, Ablixa, that she's clearly being paid to hawk. For a time, it works. Emily comes out her fog, but there are some dangerous side effects that lead to a capital "I" incident that finds Emily being railroaded into a mental institution and to Banks facing an ethics probe.

Eventually everything seems to die down, but Banks can't seem to let it go. He thinks there's something wrong with the whole thing, and he cannot, will not, rest until he's found something.
For most of the film, the question becomes about whether he's right or whether he feels so guilty for the tragedy he's complicit in that he'll do anything to lay the blame somewhere else. Most thrillers, wouldn't give the latter possibility the time of day, but Side Effects considers it long and hard.

One of the things I liked about Side Effects is the way it introduced the theme of ethical practice. Early on, Soderbergh manages to link the idea of insider trading with medical malpractice without making too overt. In the end, no one is clean, not Emily, not Tatum certainty not Banks, who left England for America under mysterious circumstances and is being paid a large amount of money to prescribe Ablixa's competitor even though, it's still in the experimental phases.

As a thriller, the film is well observed, very old fashioned, harkening back to the 70's work of Alan J. Pakula as well as to Hitchcock. There is a refreshing lack of set-pieces (not a single car chase and I don't recall a single firearm being drawn). Instead the film is uncannily focused on its plot and the unraveling of the conspiracy that may, or may not be there. When things get tense, it's because of the shifting dynamics between characters and not some artificial action scene.

Soderbergh has a peculiar identity as a filmmaker, on the one hand he has a great deal of visual splash, but yet he allows the audience to ignore or look past his razzle-dazzle. Basically, he gets out of the materials way. His film making here is elegant. Near the opening Emily visits her husband in prison. At this point we don't know that he's in jail. Another filmmaker would have had a big establishing shot of the jail, possibly with a giant sign telling us were we are. Instead, Soderbergh shows Emily checking in, and allows a background conversation to hint at were we are before he tells us explicitly. Also look at the way he switches his protagonist from Emily to Banks. It's the kind of thing books do all the time, but movies often don't even try. It's interesting to see Emily in the later scenes after the switch, to see someone who figures so large in the narrative suddenly being confined and obscured, while Banks comes into his own as a protagonist. Neither character is short changed, but Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns simply realizes that the story would benefit from changing emphasis. 

Supposedly this will be Soderbergh's final theatricaly released film before he retires (he still has a Liberace bio-pic that will show on HBO as studios felt it was "too gay for theaters"). It remains to be seen whether this is a for real retirement or a Cher retirement. I can see it going both ways. On the one hand, a man who plans on retiring does not make 6 films in just the last 5 years. Soderbergh might just be too restless a worker to retire for long. On the other hand, he might just be out of things to do, he has one of the most diverse filmographies imaginable, taking on nearly every genre at nearly every budget level. But whether or not his retirement just proves to be a hiatus, he's picked a good film to go out on. God speed to whatever he does next!

Grade: A-

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

For a film about a the worlds greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows doesn’t seem interested in showing us much actual detective work. In fact by the time the film starts Sherlock (Robert Downey Jr.) has already solved 80% of the case. Leaving him to stumble through 125 minutes of over-gimmicked action, punctuated by long stretches of inane chatter while he tidies up tieing arch nemesis Moriarty (Jared Harris) to a series of bombings. Of course Holmes is not alone on this country-hopping trek. He’s joined by faithful-ish companion Dr. Watson (Jude Law) and sometimes by a gypsy played by the wonderful  but underused Noomi Rapace (the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). To further explain the plot would be over-dignifying the plot.

This is a silly film. I tried to takes notes on all the silly or dumb scenes but I lost count, here are the highlights:

• Moriarty blows up a building to cover the simultaneous shooting of one of it’s occupants. "No one will look for a bullet after that explosion!"
• Sherlock's series of Clouseau-level disguises that include a very insensitive “chinaman.”  
• Sherlock throws Watson's wife from a train speeding over a bridge. But don't worry- He "timed it right."
• More stuff on the train. We are shown that Holmes infiltrated the bad guys cabin as a woman (see above) and replaced two specific bullets with lipstick tins that will cause the guns to backfire. Now, we are asked to believe that Holmes worked out the timing so that the fight would last X number of seconds and that the bullet that misfires would be the one pointed at his head at the end of the fight. How did he know that? What if one of his combatants had attacked in the wrong order so that the gun pointed at his head was the wrong one? How did he know the exact moment when they where going to attack with the machine gun?
• Why is Holmes’s brother Mycroft a nudist?
• How impractical is Holmes's "urban camouflage" which only works if he's standing still and in a specific spot? 

There are many, many more dumb logic-defying moments. If I told you my favorite it would spoil the film, which may not be the worst thing in the world.

I don’t mind a jazzed up Sherlock Holmes. I quite enjoyed director Guy Ritchie's previous outing. But that film actually understood Holmes even if it wasn't being orthodox, it had some restraint. But this film, from the same creative team, just doesn't have a clue. Holmes doesn’t come off as a brilliant detective as much as a conspiracy-nut who happens to be right.  The action scenes are so ridiculously hypercharched and self-indulgent that one just overloads. To make matters worse, everything that isn’t an action scene feels like padding. There are some effective scenes in the final third, most include Harris’s Moriarty, but by that point it's a hopeless cause. I will give the film some credit for knowing that Watson served in the British Army and referencing Reichenbach Falls, but on the whole, this is a dumb, irritating film with no respect or basic understanding of it's source material.

About midway through the film, an exacerbated Watson tells Holmes that "This is the last time we join forces." I'm not one to talk at the movies, but I couldn't help groaning "God I hope so!"

Grade: D

Note: If you're looking for a good take on Sherlock Holmes, I recommend Billy Wilder's 1970 film "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" or the recent, wonderful BBC series "Sherlock." The later is currently streaming on Netflix instant.