On DVD/Blu-ray: SONG TO SONG (2017) and SALT AND FIRE (2017)

SONG TO SONG
(US - 2017)

After taking 20 years off between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick's directorial output in the 2010s is coming at a furious pace that rivals Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. Counting the 40-minute IMAX film VOYAGE OF TIME, SONG TO SONG is his sixth movie of this decade, and the final part of a loose trilogy that began with 2013's TO THE WONDER and 2016's KNIGHT OF CUPS. Shot back-to-back with KNIGHT OF CUPS way back in 2012 and endlessly tinkered with by its maker, SONG TO SONG takes the first-world ennui of CUPS' self-absorbed Los Angeles navel-gazers and moves them to the hipster mecca of Austin, TX for maximum insufferability. Any hopes of Malick turning this into his own version of NASHVILLE are dashed the moment the film begins and it's the same kind of pained, whispered, emo journal entry voiceover by a dull ensemble of ciphers played by actors who, for some reason, still want to say they were in a Malick movie. If there's a central character--none of them are referred to by name--it's Faye (Rooney Mara), a waify aspiring musician who's seen onstage with a band a couple of times and seems to be friends with Patti Smith (as herself), but we never really see her working on music or practicing with the rest of the band. Faye's involved with Cook (Michael Fassbender), who's some kind of music industry A&R asshole (I guess), and BV (Ryan Gosling), another aspiring musician who doesn't seem to do much playing or songwriting and, like everyone in this film, appears to have significant disposable income. Faye drifts between both men, and during some downtime, the psychologically abusive Cook hooks up with teacher-turned-diner waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman), and even coerces Rhonda and Faye to join him in a threesome. Faye also gets involved with Parisian transplant Zoey (Berenice Marlohe) and BV with Amanda (Cate Blanchett), while almost everyone gets their turn at center stage for some of Malick's signature vacuous ruminations of the privileged and aimless.  To wit:

• "I thought we could roll and tumble. Live from song to song. Kiss to kiss."

• "I love the pain. It feels like life."

• "I'm low. I'm like the mud."

• "Foolish me. Devil." 

• "I was once like you. To think what I once was. What I am now."

• "I played with the flame of life." 

• "I feel like we're so...connected. I can't really understand. It's like..."

• "The world built a fence around you. How do you get through?  Connect?" 

• "You burn me. Who are you?"

• "I need to go back and start over."

Malick should've taken that last sentiment to heart. Like KNIGHT OF CUPS, SONG TO SONG shows the revered filmmaker continuing his ongoing descent into self-parody. This does not look like the work of a 73-year-old auteur who's been making movies for 45 years. If this same movie was presented by a film school student, it would be dismissed as self-indulgent, adolescent drivel. But Malick's defenders continue to give him a pass and insist that his detractors--a contingent of former acolytes that's growing with each new Malick journey up his own ass--just can't grasp the level of genius that's being gifted to them. Bullshit. Malick was poised to stake his claim as the Greatest American Filmmaker when Stanley Kubrick died, and brilliant films like 2005's THE NEW WORLD and 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE certainly made a strong case for his inheriting the title. But over the course of TO THE WONDER, KNIGHT OF CUPS, and now SONG TO SONG, Malick has offered enough evidence to suggest that the emperor has no clothes, and rather than the new Kubrick, he's really just the American Jean-Luc Godard, another filmmaking legend who's abandoned any semblance of narrative cohesion and for whom any negative criticism is strictly verboten. Malick goes into these films with no clear vision, instead hoping it comes together in post with the help of eight (!) credited editors. And, as was the case with WONDER and CUPS, a ton of name actors got cut out of the film when Malick decided they weren't needed, among them Christian Bale, Benicio del Toro, Haley Bennett (THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN), Boyd Holbrook (LOGAN), and Angela Bettis (MAY), along with artists Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Arcade Fire (when asked about this film in a 2013 interview after shooting wrapped, even Fassbender said he wasn't sure if he'd end up being in it). Iggy Pop and John Lydon turn up in SONG TO SONG, along with Smith, who gives the film one of its few legitimately worthwhile dramatic moments when she fondly speaks of her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. Alternating between wide-angle and fish-eye lenses and often using GoPro cameras to maximize the faux-experimental aura, Malick and renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did some extensive shooting at the 2012 Austin City Limits and Fun Fun Fun fests, which gave Fassbender a chance to wrestle with Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and let Malick waste some screen time on that. For all the impact that the Austin events brought to the film, Malick may as well have shot scenes at that year's Gathering of the Juggalos. Holly Hunter turns up briefly as Rhonda's mom and Val Kilmer does a walk-through as a wildman rock star, onstage with the Black Lips at the Fun Fun Fun fest, cutting off clumps of his hair with a Bowie knife and chainsawing an amp during a live show while yelling "I got some uranium!" Malick would've had a significantly more entertaining movie if he'd just followed Kilmer around and filmed him being weird for two hours.

It's also nice to see Malick has entered his "pervy old man" phase, with lingering, leering shots of Mara and Marlohe caressing each other, Zoey kissing Faye's hand while she masturbates, and Cook in bed with two nude escorts in what looks like an outtake from the harrowing Fassbender sex addiction drama SHAME. It's easy to assume from his last few films that Malick has forgotten how people really communicate and interact and maybe doesn't get out much anymore, and from the looks of some of the more sordid scenes in SONG TO SONG, he's apparently just discovered Cinemax. It's possible that Malick is putting a stop to this myopic nonsense with his next film, the German-set WWII drama RADEGUND, due out later this year. It stars (for now) August Diehl, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz, and the late Michael Nyqvist, and by all accounts, it's actually Malick doing a commercial film with a straightforward narrative. It's about time, because SONG TO SONG is a fucking embarrassment. (R, 129 mins)

SALT AND FIRE
(Germany/US/Mexico/France/UK - 2017)

A companion piece of sorts to his 2016 Netflix documentary INTO THE INFERNO (which was shot second but released first), SALT AND FIRE provides further evidence that, much like his 1970s New German Cinema contemporary Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog's strengths no longer lie in narrative filmmaking.  A visionary German auteur and one of cinema's most beloved eccentric raconteurs, Herzog is a tireless workaholic whose curiosity of all subjects has led him to create some of the most captivating documentaries of the modern era, including 2005's GRIZZLY MAN, 2007's ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, and 2010's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS. He once made brilliant, groundbreaking dramas like 1972's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and 1982's FITZCARRALDO, but after his superb 2006 Vietnam POW drama RESCUE DAWN, his gonzo 2009 reimagining of BAD LIEUTENANT, and his experimental 2010 misfire (though it has its admirers) MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?, Herzog's most recent forays into scripted cinema have fallen flat: his Nicole Kidman-headlined historical epic QUEEN OF THE DESERT took four years to get released in the US in April 2017, the same day as the shot-in-2015 SALT AND FIRE. MY SON, MY SON was bad, but SALT AND FIRE is easily the worst Herzog film I've seen, a deadening, ponderous slog with muddled, ham-fisted admonishments about environmental issues and filled with characters who never once speak like human beings who know how to interact with one another. Much of the dialogue sounds like stuff Herzog would've written for himself to narrate in a documentary and honestly, it would play significantly better coming out of his mouth instead of a monotone, somnambulant Michael Shannon, one of the great character actors around but who's having a really off day here. Imagine the curiously soothing tone of Herzog uttering such musings as "Truth is the only daughter of time," "Here lies a monster on the verge of waking," or "The noblest place for a man to die is the place he dies the deadest," and you've got a movie. But when those same lines are mumbled by Shannon, they sound like the pretentious ramblings of the world's most depressed Bond villain.

As SALT AND FIRE opens, scientist Dr. Laura Sommerfeld (Veronica Ferres) is on a UN fact-finding mission in South America with two colleagues--horndog Italian Dr. Fabio Cavani (Gael Garcia Bernal) and stoical German Dr. Arnold Meier (Volker Zack Michalowski)--to look into an impending ecological disaster at the Diablo Blanco salt flats (played by Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni). They're left at an abandoned airport and abducted by armed, masked men and taken to an undisclosed location where Sommerfeld is granted an audience with mastermind Matt Riley (Shannon), the CEO of a mysterious corporation known as "The Consortium." While Cavani and Meier are sidelined in the shitter for the rest of the film after secretly being given a powerful laxative (one of the film's several ill-advised attempts at levity; c'mon, Herzog...you're better than poop jokes), Riley and his chief associate Krauss (theoretical physicist Jonathan Krauss as himself) take Sommerfeld into the middle of the Diablo Blanco, where Riley informs her that a lake that was there just a few decades ago is gone and that expanding Diablo Blanco threatens to reactivate a long-dormant volcano that could obliterate mankind ("It could be 20,000 years or it could be 20...but it will happen"). After confessing that it was his company's unethical, careless practices that brought this certain disaster on the world, he abandons her in the desert with two blind children, for whom she quickly adapts to the situation to be a protective mother figure while trying to ascertain the exact of Riley's actions. Ferres and Shannon aren't given characters to play but rather, talking points to recite, with Shannon's Riley coming off as particularly hectoring in a way that borders on mansplaining, considering Ferres' Sommerfeld is the top ecology expert in her field. Popular German actress Ferres delivers her lines in a stilted, halting way that sounds like she looped them in post-production, while Shannon comes off as so lifeless that you might think Herzog pulled a HEART OF GLASS on him. SALT AND FIRE is anti-entertainment of the highest order, a film that opens as a straightforward hostage drama and flirts with becoming a disaster movie before turning into an overbearing, finger-wagging lecture, and finally, an examination of a career woman finding her true inner self when, like the volcano, her long-dormant maternal instincts are reawakened (it's mentioned that Sommerfeld has a estranged daughter who's in the custody of her ex), along with signs of a budding romance with her kidnapper. It speaks to how random and disjointed SALT AND FIRE is that it's no less than three movies before it finally settles on being a fourth with a clumsy attempt to link motherhood with nurturing Mother Earth, a metaphor that's so ineptly handled by Herzog that it comes off as a passive-aggressive, context-free rebuking of the life choices of a world-renowned science professor that also has her succumbing to the charms (?) of her creepy, morose abductor. Herzog's rarely been as wrong-headed as he is here--he should've just made a documentary about the Salar de Uyuni salt flat and everything would've turned out better for everyone. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On Netflix: THE DISCOVERY (2017)

THE DISCOVERY
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Charlie McDowell. Written by Charlie McDowell and Justin Lader. Cast: Jason Segel, Rooney Mara, Robert Redford, Jesse Plemons, Riley Keough, Ron Canada, Mary Steenburgen, Wendy Makkena, MJ Karmi. (Unrated, 102 mins)

Watching the Netflix Original film THE DISCOVERY, it seems completely feasible than director/co-writer Charlie McDowell (son of Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen) and writing partner Justin Lader (they previously worked together on the 2014 Mark Duplass indie THE ONE I LOVE) came up with a killer opening sequence and struggled to build a story around it. The first five minutes of THE DISCOVERY would make a great short film. A few years in the future, controversial physicist Dr. Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) is being interviewed by a TV news journalist (Steenburgen) on the one-year anniversary of what's come to be known as "The Discovery." Harbor is a household name the world over for finding irrefutable, scientific proof of the afterlife, demonstrating that the spirit breaks down measurable brain waves to a subatomic level as those particles venture to another plane of existence beyond our reality. Upon his presenting The Discovery to the world, death became the ultimate reward. People with terminal illnesses welcomed their diagnosis. The global suicide rate skyrocketed, as people had proof of what they now "know" is a better world waiting for them and they voluntarily check out to expedite their journey to that better place. Everyone from the homeless to the depressed to Hollywood celebrities and sports heroes started taking their own lives, with over a million suicides in the first year. As the interview goes along, one of the news crew's production assistants interrupts to say "Thank you, Dr. Harbor, for my fresh start," turns a gun on himself and blows his brains out on camera.

A year after that, Harbor is running a research facility in an isolated, gothic-looking compound in a remote Rhode Island seaside town, and is visited by his estranged son Will Stevenson (Jason Segel), a neurologist who started using his late mother's maiden name to distance himself from The Discovery. Harbor is working with his other son Toby (Jesse Plemons) and longtime research assistant Cooper (Ron Canada), with the compound staffed by Harbor acolytes, all failed suicides who now view Harbor as some kind of messiah. Will is visiting in a hapless attempt to persuade his father to stop experimenting with the afterlife, feeling tremendous guilt about the whole situation because the incident that inspired Harbor's research--a near-death experience Will had as a child--was embellished by a young and mischievous Will, who told his parents he "saw things" while he was flatlined. Harbor entertains no thoughts of abandoning his research. He's actually had a new breakthrough: a machine that can record the images seen by the recently deceased. Harbor needs a cadaver, which leads to Will, Toby, and Isla (Rooney Mara), a woman Will met on the ferry and later saved from a suicide attempt, stealing a corpse from a local hospital. Hooking the body up to the machine yields no results, but while dismantling the wires and electrodes alone, Will sees blurred images on a monitor that must be what the dead man is seeing in his afterlife. Keeping this secret from his father, Will and Isla, both damaged souls (he blames his mother's suicide on Harbor, she fell asleep and her five-year-old son vanished, never to be seen again), begin a tentative, hesitant romance while getting to the truth of the images seen in the video of the dead man's afterlife.

THE DISCOVERY falls apart right around the time Will, Isla, and Toby decide to steal a corpse from the morgue, with the lone attendant complaining "I'm doing the work of five people!" as if that's sufficient excuse for making it look that easy to wheel a dead body out of a hospital. With a premise that's crying out for someone like PRIMER and UPSTREAM COLOR auteur Shane Carruth, there's numerous directions THE DISCOVERY could've gone: a philosophical, existential FOUNTAIN mode Darren Aronofsky-meets-circa TREE OF LIFE Terrence Malick mind-bender; a love story that traverses Heaven and Earth in a more scientific take on Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE and FARAWAY, SO CLOSE; a sci-fi variant on Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER; a post-Duplass mumblecore drama; and even a horror route, with the inherent creepiness of the garbled video transmissions of the afterlife having an undeniable John Carpenter/PRINCE OF DARKNESS aura about them. But in McDowell's hands, the film doesn't take any of these paths. It just stands there, confused, until a cliched twist ending that plays out like Charlie Brooker adapting Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as an episode of BLACK MIRROR. Segel and Mara do what they can with their mopey characters (judging from her appearance here, it looks a lot like Mara's Isla was written with ANOTHER EARTH's Brit Marling in mind--this seems like the kind of project in which Marling would script and star). In one of the least-engaged performances of his career, Redford seems to have dropped by for a few days of shooting and is stuck with the film's most impenetrable and inconsistent character. Initially presented as a committed, principled man of science, Harbor isn't interested in God or religion and just looks at the hard facts, but by the second anniversary of The Discovery, he's either a manipulative cult leader or a mad scientist--the movie can't seem to decide, but Redford never adjusts his performance either way. It's a role that seems more fitting for McDowell's dad Malcolm, and Redford just looks bored, fidgety and uncomfortable throughout, like he realized after his first day on the set that this was a dud and it was too late to back out of it. For a star of his magnitude, Redford's onscreen appearances were relatively sparse from the 1980s to the 2000s as he focused his creative energies on directing and Sundance, but in the last seven years, he's been more visible than in past decades, even having fun in big-budget special effects movies like CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and PETE'S DRAGON, the kind of tentpole projects he would never do in his heyday. A living legend at 80, Redford has nothing to prove to anyone, but if THE DISCOVERY is any indication, it would perhaps behoove him to go back to being a little more picky about his acting gigs in his emeritus years. McDowell concocts an intriguing premise with THE DISCOVERY but just doesn't know what to do with it, leading to a dull, dreary misfire that does little to combat the stigma that most Netflix Original films debut there for a reason.

On DVD/Blu-ray: AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS (2013) and THE HUNT (2013)

AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS
(US - 2013)

There's some serious Terrence Malick/Robert Altman hero worship on the part of writer/director David Lowery with AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS, an artfully-shot but dreary and dull '70s-set mood piece.  Young lovers Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) are wrapping up a crime spree when they're cornered by police, an accomplice is killed, and Ruth fires a shot that injures young cop Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster).  Ruth is pregnant, and for the sake of her and their baby, Bob surrenders to the police, takes the blame for the shooting, and says he acted alone.  Four years later, Ruth has stayed out of trouble and is a single mother looked after by Skerritt (Keith Carradine), the father of their dead friend and a dangerous man with criminal ties.  Patrick and Ruth have a tentative friendship that's leaning towards a relationship when he gets word that Bob has busted out of the joint and with the authorities and three killers hired by Skerritt on his tail, is headed straight back to town to pick up Ruth and their daughter and live life on the lam. 

On paper, AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS sounds like a solid drama.  But Lowery is more interested in the aesthetic element, which would be fine if the film wasn't so dark and drably shot.  Sure, there's some shots that have an almost still photo quality and Lowery's obviously a disciple of Malick's every stylistic move (I'm talking early, BADLANDS-era Malick when he still bothered with trivialities like narrative construction), but shouldn't there be more than that?  Lowery also seems to paying special tribute to Altman's 1974 film THIEVES LIKE US, which had a similar "young couple on the run and she's pregnant" element and starred Carradine and featured Tom Skerritt in a supporting role, very likely the source of Carradine's character name.  SAINTS boasts a strong and internalized performance by Foster and an excellent one by Carradine, in what's probably his best role in years and the film's most interesting character (Lowery even lets him sing the closing credits song and his voice hasn't lost a bit of that "I'm Easy" magic), but the film can't overcome its stale plot, sluggish pacing, and a pair of ineffectual performances by Affleck and Mara.  Affleck's naturally mumbly delivery has worked in his favor before, particularly in his Oscar-nominated turn in 2007's THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and the recent OUT OF THE FURNACE, but here he underplays to the point of catatonia.  He and Mara both sound like they might doze off in mid-sentence every time they open their mouth.  By the time it's over, you may find that the film's high points are the performances of Foster and especially Carradine, who obviously has a huge fan in Lowery.  Now that he's got a fake Malick film out of his system, maybe next time Lowery should write a script specifically tailored for Carradine.  That sounds like a winner.  (R, 96 mins)


THE HUNT
(Denmark/Sweden/Belgium - 2012/2013 US release)

Ghost-produced by Lars von Trier, THE HUNT is one of the top feel-bad movies of the year.  Directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg (THE CELEBRATION), the film stars Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas, a mild-mannered nice guy who's divorced and has a teenage son who's thinking about moving in with him permanently.  A teacher by profession, Lucas was laid off after the school closed, but now he's helping out at a pre-school in the small town where he lives.  He works, hangs out with his buddies, and leads a generally quiet life, and things are starting to progress romantically with co-worker Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport).  All that goes to shit when he's accused of sexually abusing young Klara (a remarkable performance by Annika Wedderkopp in a very difficult role).  Klara is the daughter of Lucas' best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) and trusted family friend Lucas frequently walks her to school.  Klara develops a harmless crush on Lucas and in one of those awkward moments where kids imitate adults, kisses him on the lips when he's horsing around in the school playroom with some of the boys.  Lucas handles the issue in a way that's sensitive to Klara, but she's embarrassed and makes up a story using verbiage she overheard her older brother and his friend using when they were looking at a porno mag.  Lucas' boss Grethe (Susse Wold) handles the matter in the most overzealous manner possible, properly notifying the police but then immediately telling all the parents and even calling Lucas' ex-wife, who lives out of town with their son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom).  The cops questioning little Klara practically put the words in her mouth and before he even realizes what's happening, Lucas is the town pariah, ostracized by everyone, banned from all business establishments, and Theo and his wife Agnes (Anne Louise Hassing) want nothing more to do with him, even after Klara confesses that nothing happened and she made it up.  The damage is done and a mob mentality forms throughout the town, with more parents coming forward with allegations that Lucas molested their children as well. 

THE HUNT mellows out as it goes along, but for a while, it's a harrowing experience.  The tension mounts as Lucas grows increasingly panicked over the situation and can't get a straight answer out of anyone, and it's hard not getting angry at the "villages storming Castle Frankenstein" reaction of his friends and acquaintances as the situation quickly and plausibly spirals out of control. The resolution probably wouldn't work if this got an American remake, which seems likely.  A mainstream take on this would've turned Lucas' plight into a STRAW DOGS-style siege situation leading to a vengeance saga.  There is an element of that here, and in the fate of one individual, but Vinterberg doesn't proceed in that direction, instead going for that arthouse ambiguity in an ending that doesn't provide closure, which is probably the whole point.  THE HUNT is a top-notch suspense drama with an outstanding performance by Mikkelsen, who took home the Best Actor prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival for his brilliant work here.  (R, 116 mins)

In Theaters: SIDE EFFECTS (2013)

SIDE EFFECTS
(US - 2013)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh.  Written by Scott Z. Burns.  Cast: Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum, Vinessa Shaw, Ann Dowd, Polly Draper, Mamie Gummer, David Costabile, Peter Friedman, Laila Robins, Michael Nathanson, Sheila Tapia. (R, 106 mins)

Steven Soderbergh has been announcing his retirement from feature films for several years now, and SIDE EFFECTS feels like what must be his seventh or eighth "last" film.  For a guy on the verge of retirement, he's been highly prolific:  SIDE EFFECTS is his third directorial feature in the last 13 months (after HAYWIRE and MAGIC MIKE), plus his upcoming HBO Michael Douglas-as-Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA is set to air later this year.  Whether he means it or if he just needs some time away from Hollywood remains to be seen, but SIDE EFFECTS finds Soderbergh in top form, working from a script by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote Soderbergh's 2009 film THE INFORMANT! and 2011's CONTAGION), and fashioning a cleverly-constructed puzzler that starts out as one thing and very seamlessly and organically becomes another, all the while frequently misdirecting the audience but never cheating.

In a performance demonstrating the same intensity she brought to David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Rooney Mara is Emily Taylor, a young NYC ad agency staffer who's been on her own after her Wall Street husband Martin (Channing Tatum) was busted by the Feds for insider trading.  After serving four years in a minimum-security facility, Martin is paroled and Emily finds the adjustment difficult.  She's battled depression in the past and it rears its ugly head once more when she's hospitalized after intentionally driving her car into a parking garage wall at full speed.  In the hospital, she's consulted by attending psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who agrees to take her on as a patient and prescribes Zoloft, but the side effects leave Emily fatigued, moody, and withdrawn.  After discussing Emily's situation with her former psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Banks decides to prescribe the relatively new (and fictional) Ablixa.  Emily responds well to Ablixa, with more energy, better moods, and a hyperactive sex drive, but even it has side effects, such as prolonged episodes of sleepwalking where Emily spends the day on the subway and forgets to go to work, or wanders the apartment, blasting music and preparing elaborate meals with no memory of it the next morning.

It's during one of these sleepwalking episodes that Emily unknowingly kills someone and completely blacks out afterward.  It's here that Soderbergh and Burns shift the focus to Law's Dr. Banks, who finds himself a toxic pariah under fire by the cops, the lawyers, his colleagues, the ethics board, and the media when Emily blames the medication for her actions.  He's thrown under the bus by the partners in his practice, cut loose from a $50,000 contract for an experimental sleep med (which he also prescribed to Emily), has a professional transgression from his past drudged up, and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) is sent photos that seem to reveal an affair with Emily.  Banks' personal and professional lives come crashing down around him, and he starts getting the paranoid feeling that this is something much bigger than Emily's Ablixa side effects.

 

SIDE EFFECTS initially seems like it'll be an indictment of the pharmaceutical industry done with the clinical, point-by-point approach Soderbergh brought to the 2000 drug-trade chronicle TRAFFIC and the global contamination thriller CONTAGION.  But Soderbergh has always been a filmmaker who can deftly balance numerous styles and approaches to his work, whether tackling environmental issues in the form of a crowd-pleaser like 2000's ERIN BROCKOVICH, or using imaginative non-linear directorial and editing techniques on genre fare like HAYWIRE, 1998's OUT OF SIGHT, or 1999's THE LIMEY.  SIDE EFFECTS finds Soderbergh on his more straightforward, commercial, OCEAN'S ELEVEN side, and though it goes in unpredictable directions, it really displays no more depth than a vintage LAW & ORDER episode and would likely be made-for-TV movie material in lesser hands (there's even a humorous bit where Emily is describing the pre-prison era of her marriage to Banks and Soderbergh films the flashback in the same style as a prescription drug TV commercial).  The term "Hitchcockian" will be bandied about until the end of time, but it applies here, not just in the way the story switches gears and cleverly misdirects (think PSYCHO), but also in the construction.  SIDE EFFECTS is almost quaintly old-fashioned in the way it draws you in, manipulates you, then pulls the rug out on you.  When most films attempt this, it feels cheap and forced, and many filmmakers find that they have to cheat by negating earlier elements of the plot and unsuccessfully cramming pieces that don't fit into the plot holes left behind. Soderbergh and Burns are smarter than that--they don't overshoot and don't go so far as to back themselves into a corner where they have to fudge it and force things to work that don't.  In our post-USUAL SUSPECTS and post-Shyamalan world of suspense thrillers, everything has to have a crazy twist or ten, and more often than not, they collapse because they're trying too hard to outdo everything else.  SIDE EFFECTS plays it a lot cooler, offering twists, but they're plausible and restrained twists.  That's the kind of expertise that someone like Soderbergh brings to the table.

Is SIDE EFFECTS a "great" film?  Is it going to be a "classic"?  Probably not, and it isn't aspiring to be.  But it's smart, well-written, tightly-constructed, excellently-acted (even by Soderbergh man-crush Tatum), masterfully-directed, and above all, extremely entertaining.  It's refreshing proof that commercially-geared popcorn movies can be fun and intelligent and made for grown-ups without pandering to the lowest common denominator and dumbing everything down.  It expects you to turn your phone off, pay attention and keep up, and it generously rewards those simple actions accordingly.  Remember when that wasn't asking much from an audience?