Film's side effects not worth the risks
In these pages and elsewhere, I’ve stated that mainstream moviemakers will always sacrifice clinical accuracy for narrative sizzle when push comes to shove. But I’ll always forgive a film that is only mildly inaccurate and owns redeeming artistic or sheer entertainment value. In recent years, "Homeland" and much of the "In Treatment" series fit that bill. I can’t forgive Soderbergh, whose hits like "Ocean’s Eleven" draw large audiences, for encouraging a multitude of misperceptions in order to make a dismal dud that could easily discourage an emotionally distressed viewer from seeking psychiatric care. I’ve always avoided the periodic wrangling over this issue. However, "Side Effects" is the only film that I believe does pose a substantive risk of putting off prospective clients. What follows is an anatomy of its mistakes and downright falsifications:
• In a case like Emily’s, it would be conceivable but uncommon for a psychiatrist treating a noncriminal patient to also be a qualified forensic expert, tasked to render the pivotal opinion about the client’s competence to stand trial. It would be decidedly rare for that psychiatrist to undertake inpatient treatment of the patient he’s been instrumental in committing. (Let me know if I’m wrong on this score.)
• No lawsuit is ever brought against the manufacturer of a drug with such lethal potential, nor against Dr. Banks for prescribing Ablixa, as would most certainly happen in the litigation-loving real world. (The validity of such legal action is beside the point.) Dr. Banks would seem to have a fourth-rate insurance carrier without a risk-management service. He’s not represented by a skilled malpractice attorney who might advise him not to testify at all if possible or would sharply limit his testimony. In either case, he would be cautioned to cease all contact with Emily.
• These and other omissions could proceed from the creative team’s blind ignorance or willful disregard of the facts in order to facilitate a tighter, more-compelling narrative, as noted above. While annoying to the practitioner, the elisions would not have significant impact on our notional prospective patient. The film’s negative presentation of various psychiatric therapies, and particularly its toxic characterization of practitioners themselves, is vastly more off-putting.
• Soderbergh seems bent on having it both ways vis-a-vis psychopharmacology. He discharges psychotropics from blame by revealing that Emily’s somnambulism and other side effects were malingered, then subliminally criticizes their use. The plentiful mention of unpleasant reactions to well-known psychotropics outweighs citing their very real benefits, particularly to seriously ill patients. (Be it noted in all fairness that Soderbergh also intimates, if distantly, that Big Pharma’s rampant hucksterism may be turning us into pill pushers and folks with ordinary woes into enthusiastic pill poppers.)
• The inpatient service where Emily is confined is at best a drab, cheerless place, where no one seems to care or do very much for the clientele beyond drugs and restraints. But via plot developments, the mise-en-scene’s design, and declarations of camera, the milieu is eventually transformed into a snake-pit cum penitentiary. Patients are totally at the mercy of their minders. Tyrannical psychiatrists can, on a whim, reduce them to vegetative compliance by overmedication and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
• To wangle Emily’s confession, Dr. Banks shows her an ECT treatment like an inquisitor exhibiting the instruments of torture to a recalcitrant heretic. He also infers that ECT memory loss is permanent. Soderbergh resurrects the standard "shake-rattle-and-roll" depiction of earlier mental health movies in which ECT – which in many cases rivals drugs in effectiveness for major affective disorders with fewer side effects – is painted as a barbaric assault upon brain and body.
• Most disheartening is the unsympathetic, even repellant portrayal of virtually every psychiatrist in the film. Underneath her empathic facade, Dr. Siebert is a debauched ice queen, a sleek pantheress capable of loving someone only as perverse and corrupt as she is. Dr. Banks’s colleagues quickly desert him when he most needs collegial support. They’re a timorous, distasteful lot – one recommends Effexor passim but offers not a jot of compassion. "Side Effects" quickly establishes that Dr. Banks is a smart, compassionate humanitarian when, at his ER consultation/liaison job, he identifies a Haitian patient’s supposed hallucinations as a cultural manifestation of grief. But he escapes Emily’s web of deceit by easily identifying with the aggressor, first introjecting, then outdoing her wickedness. Emily happily slaughtered Martin. Now Dr. Banks takes equal pleasure in murdering her spirit. In the closing sequence, he’s seen dropping off his son at a ritzy private school, with his contented wife at his side. All would seem as before, but the taint of Dr. Banks’s spectacular wrongdoing hover around him, rendering his reversion to benevolent healer profoundly suspect. One is reminded of the conclusion of "Suspicion," which suddenly revealed that Cary Grant/Johnnie never plotted his wife’s murder for her money; he’s always loved her and saw her as his redeemer. The studio allegedly suppressed Hitchcock’s original ending, which unmasked Johnnie’s remorseless psychopathy and had him strangle the wife. The taint of Johnnie’s evil hangs ominously over the bogus happy ending, utterly undoing it. Even auteurs like Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Welles had their flops. Several of Soderbergh’s previous pictures were unsuccessful but always honorable failures.
