Side Effects

 Steven Soderburgh's Side Effects is an overwrought neo-Noir with a complicated and silly plot.  Criminal enterprises that take years to develop and involve staging near-suicides and infiltrating mental hospitals and jails as inmates no less always beg this question:  why don't the protagonists just get a job and earn money in the conventional way as opposed to engaging in these sorts of risky, time-consuming, and difficult criminal maneuvers.  For a heist film to work, there has to be some indication that the value of the ill-gotten gains exceeds the ordeal required to steal them -- if this ordeal involves crashing cars into walls at high-speed, criminal prosecution, and incarceration in a madhouse, one might argue that the loot isn't worth the effort to snatch it.  Side Effects, although skillfully made, also founders on a central bit of completely implausible business -- the shrink treating the heroine who is alleged to have killed her husband while "sleepwalking" becomes the woman's expert witness in her criminal trial and, then, somehow ends up as her guardian when she is acquitted by reason on insanity.  This makes no sense -- the psychiatrist is obviously the central witness in the case since he prescribed for her the medication from which the homicidal side-effects arose.  Obviously, every professional boundary is violated by these proceedings, particularly since there are threats to sue the doctor for medical malpractice and, when his partners at his clinic toss him out for conflicts of interest, of course, they are exactly right that this guy's behavior is not only wildly implausible but completely unethical.  Not that the doc's partners are particularly righteous themselves -- we see them gloating about attending professional conferences in Maui at the expense of Big Pharma and, then, using their patients as test subjects for new drugs on the basis of lucrative consulting fees.  Although ostensibly set in the here and now, the movie shows antediluvian practices in the pharmaceutical industry that have been outlawed for years.  (My wife, who is a psycho-therapist used to collect gratuity promotional pens distributed by Pharma representatives; she had one of the much-sought penis-shaped pens used to promote Viagra.  But her pen-collecting came to an abrupt end when new guidelines were announced that health care providers weren't even allowed to receive writing instruments from Pharma companies.)  

There's no way to write about Side Effects without spoilers and, so, if you are interested in watching this movie, a film in which much of its interest arises from various incredible twists and turns, don't read the rest of this note.  Emily (Rooney Mara) is married to the handsome Martin (Tatum Channing).  Martin was once a high-roller on Wall Street who is now serving time in prison for insider trading -- that is, SEC violations.  When he is released, Emily slips into a deep depression and sees Dr. Banks (Jude Law) for her illness -- she has attempted suicide by driving her car into a parking ramp wall.  Banks prescribes her various anti-depressants none of which work.  He sees her previous therapist, played with fine malice by Catherine Zeta-Jones.  This therapist suggests that Banks put Emily on a new drug, something called Abilify (or a name approximately similar).  Unfortunately, a side-effect of Abilify is sleepwalking.  In a somnambulant fit, Emily knifes her husband to death and, then, claims to have no memory of the crime.  Charged with murder, somehow Dr. Banks acts as Emily's expert witness in Court and she is acquitted by reason of insanity -- in other words, the sleepwalking defense is successful.  This isn't the end of Emily's problems -- she's sent to a snake-pit hospital for the criminally insane.  The trial was high-profile and adverse publicity causes the value of equities in the company manufacturing Abilify to crash; simultaneously, stock in other firms making competitor anti-depressants soars.  This summarizes the first half of the movie.  The second part of Side Effects demonstrates that everything is a hoax and that Emily's travails are part of an elaborate criminal scheme to manipulate the stock market and earn money by illegal insider trading.  Poor Dr. Banks, who has been pilloried for his treatment of Emily, suspects that something is awry and uncovers the criminal scheme.  However, this criminal enterprise is so complicated and bafflingly perverse that it's not clear whether Banks has gone mad, suffering from some sort of paranoia, or is simply a heroic truth-teller.  (To the movie's credit, and due to its completely implausible plot, the viewer thinks Banks is completely crazy for most of the part of the film involving the convoluted explanation for Emily's murder of her stockbroker husband.)  It turns out that Emily and the therapist played Catherine Zeta-Jones are involved in a torrid lesbian affair.  The therapist trains Emily in how to pretend to be depressed.  Emily, who has apparently acquired stockbroker expertise, teaches the therapist how to engage in insider trading.  Emily murders her husband in order to accuse Abilify of causing her somnambulist homicide.  This causes the stock market to react so that the crooked, lesbian therapist can make enormous profits by investing in the  shares of the competitor companies.  Banks, finally, figures this out and takes a (sort of) ghastly revenge on Emily -- he commits her to a mad-house and prescribes her Thorazine and Depakote, turning her into a stumbling zombie with alopecia.  I don't recall what vengeance is wreaked upon the wicked therapist.  

This is the sort of movie that has not one but two deadly femme fatales (Mara and Zeta-Jones), the typical somewhat dimwitted and lecherous fall-guy (Law) integral to film noir, and a plot that sets back the interests of lesbians and people suffering from depression about twenty years -- that is, if anyone saw this picture, which, apparently, no one did.  It's shot in sickly jaundiced yellows and greens, featuring melancholy-looking urban landscapes. (The film is also deliriously unfair to Big Pharma although its hard to sympathize with that industry -- they're bad but not for the reasons shown in the film.) Performances are all good, but the plot is so contrived as to be completely unbelievable.  The movie was released in 2012, revived on Netflix, and was subsidized in part by the Louisiana Film Board -- this seems odd since the movie takes place entirely on Manhattan and in Westchester County.  But, in  retrospect, there's one gaudy flashback showing the stockbroker's wife at a garden party in some lush bright surroundings -- the feds come and arrest the stockbroker for SEC violations; this flashback probably was shot in Louisiana to justify the tax credit or subsidy as the case may be.