I walked out of Steven Soderbergh’s “Side Effects’’ thinking to myself, “Finally, a mainstream 2013 movie I can whole-heartedly recommend’’ — then quickly added, “well, except that it will probably piss off a sizeable portion of the target audience.’’
Moviegoers, including those who’ve seen the deliberately misleading trailer — and especially including all those who fell for Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike” — may well feel they’ve been sucker-punched for their $12, buying tickets to a pill-popping drama that suddenly turns into something entirely different.
OK, you’ve had the consumer warning. And though I’ll avoid spoilers more than I usually do — this is a rare film where it’s worth keeping secrets — be warned there’s going to be a bit of hinting.
At first, it seems like the film’s protagonist is 20-something Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose husband, Martin (Tatum), has just been released from prison after serving four years for insider trading.
His absence — and her relocation from a palatial Connecticut home to an Upper Manhattan apartment appear to have taken quite a psychic toll on poor Emily.
Martin is concerned his listless spouse is seriously depressed even before Emily drives her car into a wall.
In the emergency room, she meets Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a psychiatrist who takes her on as a private patient and tries to treat Emily with a menu of psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft.
Nothing seems to work until Emily’s former therapist, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) helpfully suggests to Banks that he try a new wonder drug, the fictional Ablixa.
“Side Effects’’ appears initially to be a mordant satire of America’s prescription-drug culture — everybody’s taking some sort of mood stabilizer, and Banks himself is being wined and dined by the makers of another fictional drug who recruit him to conduct paid tests.
But when a major character dies half an hour in — I’m not giving away anything that isn’t in the trailer or a flash-forward in the opening scene — Soderbergh shifts gears to the tune of a Hitchcockian thriller. (“Psycho’’ and “Vertigo’’ being the most obvious classics being riffed upon.)
There’s a good reason that Law, and not Mara, gets top billing here. The focus shifts to the good Dr. Banks, who loses his practice, and his unemployed wife (Vinessa Shaw), as he becomes obsessed with clearing his name after the death gets him labeled “PILL KILLER’’ on the front page of The Post.
Insufferably callow in his leading-man period, Law has become a fascinating actor in middle age, especially playing weaselly but not wholly unsympathetic characters like he does here and in Soderberg’s “Contagion’’ (which, like “Side Effects,’’ was written by Scott Z. Burns).
Mara gives an appropriately enigmatic performance in a film that’s also been immaculately photographed and edited by Soderbergh, with Thomas Newman contributing the highly effective score.
Tatum has basically repaid Soderbergh here for his breakthrough performance in “Magic Mike’’ — a surprise hit — by serving the eye-candy function generally reserved for actresses. (What the two films — and the director’s “The Girlfriend Experience’’ — have in common is a lively interest, rare in American movies, about people’s struggles during an economic downturn.)
And fourth-billed Zeta-Jones? If you surrender to the chilly, cerebral jape that is “Side Effects,’’ she delivers a great campy jolt at the end. If not, she’ll likely have you demanding your money back.
What Soderbergh claims will be his last theatrical feature for “a long time’’ is the sort of movie best appreciated by us jaded movie critics — and those Soderbergh fans who share our fascination with his daring, sometimes perverse, experiments with film.