Pills and Thrills: Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Jude Law stars in Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects opens like a horror movie, with a tantalizingly eerie scene of bloodstains, and bloody footprints, on the floor of a New York apartment. While the audience is perched on the edge of their seats, waiting to find out what’s happened, the action flashes back to the events that brought us here: a young, would-be Master of the Universe (Channing Tatum, the smooth operator who was the central focus of Soderbergh’s previous film, Magic Mike) is released from prison after serving four years for insider trading, and is greeted by his mousy wife, Emily (Rooney Mara). Emily, who appears to be unmoored and suicidally depressed over the change in her family’s fortunes, begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), and is put on a (fictional) new drug called Ablixa, whose manufacturers have a financial arrangement with the good doctor. (Basically, he’s trawling among his patient base, looking for willing guinea pigs.)

By the middle of the movie, we come full circle and find out how that apartment floor got so red and messy, and it’s a horrific event, all right. But although Side Effects is, in essence, a kind of murder mystery, the murder itself isn’t its main engine for generating suspense. It’s just the plot device needed to get the Law character in a position to worry about being professionally humiliated and discredited, to such a degree that it costs him everything: his reputation, his business (his partners are quick to dump him when things look bad), his income stream, even his marriage (to an expertly tart Vinessa Shaw). Part of what makes Side Effects such a modern American movie is that its hero, whose life never seems to be in danger, qualifies as being in dire peril because his career might be heading for the drain. 

Nothing New Here: And Everything is Going Fine

Spalding Gray: And Everything is Going Fine (2010)

I was lucky enough to see the late monologist Spalding Gray on three different occasions when he came to Toronto with his shows, Gray’s Anatomy (1994), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997) and Morning, Noon and Night (1999), where he wittily expounded on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the pains of aging to becoming a father late in life. (I still remember with relish his encounter with the elderly Richard M. Nixon in a doctor's office and his initial thought that someone was wearing a Nixon mask in the waiting room.) His monologues were fast-paced, insightful and cleverly laid out, especially considering that they were in effect just Gray usually sitting behind a desk and talking for 90 minutes or so. And yet, despite his frankness on stage, particularly about his mother’s suicide and his own thoughts and worries that he, too, would end up doing the same, his finally ending his life in early 2004, at age 62, still came as a shock to me. I figured, as I’m sure so many other people did too, that Gray was successfully utilizing his monologues as a therapeutic catharsis to help keep his demons at bay. And truth be told, for many years, he did. Of course, no one could have foreseen the 2001 car accident in Ireland, which left him with physical and mental injuries and eventually drove him to the permanent despair that is suicide. Critics at Large’s Susan Green got a taste of what was troubling Gray when she interviewed him in 2002.

Last year, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape, Ocean’s Eleven), who had cast Gray in King of the Hill (1993), playing ironically enough a suicide victim, and directed the film adaptation of Gray’s Anatomy (1996), premièred his documentary on Spalding Gray, entitled And Everything is Going Fine at the Slamdance Film Festival. It’s now in general release, but sad to say, it likely won’t please Gray’s legion of fans, or Soderbergh’s for that matter.

Flamboyant Disguise: Behind the Candelabra

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra

Last Sunday night I saw Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in a position I never imagined I would see. They were in the throes of passion, with each other! These two action film heroes portrayed Liberace and his chauffeur lover Scott Thorson in Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Behind the Candelabra. Based on Thorson’s memoirs of the same name, this made for HBO film was a brilliant evocation of a more innocent era, when people just didn’t believe what was staring them in the face. In one of the first scenes, Matt Damon (as Thorson) attends a Liberace show in Vegas and comments to his date, “It’s all so gay!” and his friend says, “The ladies don’t think so.” As Thorson looks around, sure enough, it’s confirmed, the ladies are in love with this flamboyant piano player.

Gesundheit: A Big Dose of Fear On the Big Screen

Jennifer Ehle as a research scientist in Contagion

There was no way I could remain objective at a recent matinee of Contagion, the star-studded thriller by Steven Soderbergh about a new virus strain that decimates humanity. A few decades ago, I was stricken by the kind of flu that keeps moving from one part of the body to another. Down for the count, I spent five weeks malingering in bed. A friend intending to cheer me up dropped by with a gift he didn’t realize would, in fact, have the opposite effect. It was a paperback copy of The Stand – Stephen King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic novel, in which humanity is decimated by a new virus strain.

I finally recovered back then, of course. As an ardent believer in flu shots now, I rarely even come down with a cold any more. Earlier this month, though, I returned from a visit to Toronto with a whopper (Thank you, Canada!) that still has me hacking and sniffling more than a week later. And that’s how I slipped into a dark movie theater the other day, hoping not to frighten the few other patrons enjoying a good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster with hordes of protagonists and extras hacking and sniffling and foaming at the mouth and experiencing convulsions.

Time Waits for No One

Coming back to Ryerson University to teach a film course for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, I decided to start with a class about the nature of time. Even though I had had the idea shortly before I became sick, it had acquired some poignancy during the months of treatment. Time wasn't just the philosophical exercise I first considered, but a tangible entity that I was growing quite intimate with. I came to see that you can't beat time because – to paraphrase George Harrison – time flows on within you and without you. We may try to organize time through our calendars and appointment books to construct a linear path of going forward through the weeks, months and years. But we can run out of time despite what our daytimer tells us. When we are awake, we are conscious of time passing. Yet we sleep for eight hours a night and it never seems like eight hours when we open our eyes to the morning.

Time is independent of our existence whether we are conscious of it or not. It may be one reason why some of us fear going to sleep at night because it's then that our futile control over time slips out of our grasp. As we enter the world of dreams, time shifts into realms of abstract reality. It's movies that allow us to experience time in that abstract reality, as if we were to find ourselves in a waking dream. Perhaps that's why some people fear movies and choose to attend only some pictures, while avoiding others that may disturb their sense of order. Unlike in the other arts such as literature, theatre, opera and the visual arts, where we can experience a work in linear time – giving us full control of what we read, watch and hear – movies are about surrendering our control to the eye of the camera and the sensibility of the person behind the lens.

Departures and Arrivals: Watching Movies on Airplanes

Due to a family emergency, I recently spent the equivalent of 34 hours in the air flying overseas to Goa, India and back. Fortunately, I have no fear of flying, but when you spend that much time in airplanes there is only so much sleeping and reading that you can do. I’ve never been one to stare off into space during air journeys, so I watched a lot of movies. Jet Airways, an Indian-based airline, is a very modern service with comfortable seats, good service and individual seat-back video screens. They offer a full array of movies from Hollywood and Bollywood. I’ve never been that much of a Bollywood fan, so I really wasn’t in the mood for those long films with the out-of-the-blue ubiquitous dancing and singing scenes – don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some of the pictures and have liked them, but there’s only one I can hands down recommend, even though it is over three hours long: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), directed by Adiya Chopra and starring Bollywood’s Tom Cruise, Shahrukh Khan – so I brought up the list of Hollywood films. There were a lot.

In the past year, I’ve really have been remiss in seeing the new offerings out of Hollywood (I'm told I haven't missed much), so this journey became an ideal opportunity to catch up on some films I’d intended to see, but never got around to them. Little did I know until I got home that the pictures I watched actually fit two themes that reflected both my journey to Goa and back. The films on offer ranged from ‘70s classics, Chinatown, to hits from 2011 such as Dolphin’s Tale and Puss in Boots. There is a certain restlessness when you are stuck on an airplane, so as I flipped through the list, I ticked off a few I was interested in seeing. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to watch anything I’d already seen (bye bye, Chinatown). So I settled in to watch a number of films, some that both Shlomo and Susan reviewed in Critics at Large when they were first released.

Blow Hard: Jude Law in Dom Hemingway

In Richard Shepard's incessantly verbose Dom Hemingway, Jude Law plays the title character, a British safecracker who has spent 12 years in prison for not ratting out his boss. Pumped up like a Cockney Jake LaMotta and with Popeye biceps to match, Hemingway is a boastful blowhard who in the opening scene gets progressively hard from the blow job he's receiving from a fellow prisoner. Hemingway, eager to be released so he can finally get the money owed him, addresses the camera while crowing about being – quite literally – the cock of the walk until he finally ejaculates. The stunt of watching Jude Law, who has built a career portraying mostly mild-mannered sorts, spitting invective at the same pace as his mounting erection is a clever joke. But Dom Hemingway can't sustain the cartoon intensity of its lead character because there's nothing behind the bluster. It's a one-note joke about potency and it dies with the money shot.

Neglected Gem: The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

Stella Stevens and Jason Robards in Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue. (Photo: Getty)

In a brilliant essay for Critics at Large on women in Sam Peckinpah’s movies, Amanda Shubert wrote that The Ballad of Cable Hogue “distills the romantic spirit at the core of Peckinpah’s sensibility: love without possession.” In the romance between Cable (Jason Robards), who finds water in the middle of the Arizona desert and turns it into a watering hole called Cable Springs for stagecoach passengers, and Hildy (Stella Stevens), a prostitute whom the citizens of nearby Dead Dog run out of town, love without ownership is merely an extension of the transitoriness to which they are philosophically dedicated because they recognize it as the state of things. In the movie’s opening episode, Cable is robbed by his partners, Taggart (L.Q. Jones) and Bowen (Strother Martin) – playing a variation on the bounty hunter roles they created in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch the previous year – and left for dead without water in the desert. He survives four dry days through sheer orneriness while, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, he keeps up a running monologue to God, assuming that his maker has no intention of letting him die of thirst. He finds water just as he’s about to give up, but the sign of God’s grace at the eleventh hour and the sudden twist in his fortune impart an indelible awareness of morality and the fact that we don’t own time, or our own lives. For Hildy, Dead Dog – a town that deserves its name – where she ekes out a ramshackle existence, seeing customers in a room above the saloon, is merely a way station for her; her destination is San Francisco, and being forced to leave brings it that much closer. She stops by Cable Springs and lives with Hogue for a few blissful weeks – what the characters played by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight would call a “time out” from their lives. She wants him to come with her to San Francisco, but he’s stubborn about waiting for Taggart and Bowen to swing through the desert again so he can get his long-awaited revenge. So she goes on without him. She returns for him three years later, this time to invite him to New Orleans, after he’s had that revenge, or something like it; by now he’s ready to run away with her. But fate has other plans, and Hildy is its unwitting envoy: the chauffeur-driven automobile that brings her slides down a hill, Cable steps in, instinctively, to save Bowen, and he ends up getting run over. Hildy keeps him company during his last days, and leaves after his funeral.

Resurgence: The Christophers

Michaela Cole and Ian McKellan in The Christophers. (Photo: Department M.)

There isn’t a sentimental moment in Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. Julian is a painter in the sunset of his life who hasn’t made any new work in twenty years; he’s long since faded from celebrity, but a mystique remains around an unfinished series known as “the Christophers,” which he abandoned when he broke up with the lover to whom they were dedicated. His dreadful children (amusingly sketched by James Corden and Jessica Gunning), with whom he has apparently had no relationship for years, terrified that at his death they will be left without any inheritance, hire a young artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to forge finished versions of the paintings if indeed they exist at all, or to create them if they don’t. They persuade her to apply for the job of their dad’s new assistant in order to gain entrée to his studio. But though Lori has a history with Sklar that he is unaware of and that should definitely encourage her to take his children’s side – as a nineteen-year-old aspiring painter, she endured a withering critique by him on a TV show – her response to the young Sklars’ mission turns out to be very complicated. So is Ed Solomon’s intriguing screenplay, which weighs the questions of legacy and ownership in the arts and the bearing of the personal on the artistic as no movie has since Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours in 2008.

Remembering the Talking Man

“Critics call me a monologist,” explained Spalding Gray. “But I refer to myself as a storyteller – no, not a storyteller. The Talking Man, that’s what I say.”At that moment, eight years ago, the acclaimed 60-year-old performer was talking on the telephone from New York’s Long Island. His minimalist one-man shows -- such as Swimming to Cambodia, filmed by Jonathan Demme in 1987 -- were wildly entertaining even though Gray would remain seated at a table. He used props for emphasis, while animatedly exploring the world’s foibles and the humor in his own neurosis.

Moral Quagmires: Kate Plays Christine (2016) and American Animals (2018)

Kate Lyn Sheil as Christine Chubbuck in Kate Plays Christine. (Photo: Variety)

My last week's piece on The Disaster Artist (2017) brought to mind two other films in the genre of quasi-documentary: Kate Plays Christine (2016) and American Animals (2018). All three films place the viewer in a morally awkward position – for The Disaster Artist, the position is that of identifying with not Tommy Wiseau but those working for him.

Kate Plays Christine is a case of docudrama as moral entrapment. Director Robert Greene hires Kate Lyn Sheil to prepare to play Christine Chubbuck, a real-life newscaster in the '70s who shot herself in the head during a live broadcast and later died. But though it's made in documentary style by Greene (a documentarian), it's not strictly a documentary, because it documents the making of a film that was, in fact, never made. That nonexistent film serves as the MacGuffin for the whole enterprise. (Coincidentally, a biopic of Chubbuck called Christine was made the same year.)

From Jackal To Weasel: The Legend of Carlos

Sure, Carlos chronicles the rise and fall of an extremist, but the brilliant Olivier Assayas drama also is very much about the wages of personal decline. Shot as a three-part French television miniseries, the picture profiles a Venezuelan named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who reinvented himself as the dreaded Carlos. (It was a British newspaper that later added “the Jackal” to his nom de guerre.) Periodic archival footage serves as a reminder that this account is more or less how it all went down; additional truth emerges from magnificent writing, photography, editing and acting.

By the time he appears on screen at age 23, in the early 1970s, the arrogant idealist (portrayed by Edgar Ramirez) has honed the Marxist views inherited from his parents and furthered by studies in world domination at a Moscow university. There’s also been some training in Jordan as a fighter for the anti-Zionist cause. While many of his American contemporaries are demonstrating against the Vietnam War, Carlos chooses a path far more insidious than that of the Weather Underground. “I don’t believe in protests,” he says at one point. “Words get us nowhere … Behind every bullet we fire, there will be an idea.”

Stephen King X 2: The Outsider and Castle Rock

Author Stephen King.

Stephen King turned 70 almost a year ago but this most prolific of authors hasn’t slowed down one iota. In fact, he has two books out this year from Scribner, The Outsider, currently in bookstores, and Elevation, a short novel due out in October. He’s also maintained a high quality of output in recent years, from his Mr. Mercedes horror/mystery trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) to the sensational and incredibly visceral science-fiction novel Under the Dome, as well as his touching, thoughtful time travel tale 11/22/63 and Revival, his chilling examination of life after death.

The Outsider is quasi-police procedural and part horror, set in a fictional Oklahoma town called Flint City, and beginning with the arrest of respected teacher and beloved baseball coach Terry Maitland for the heinous rape and murderer of an eleven-year-old boy. Police detective Ralph Anderson is so sure of Maitland’s guilt that he arrests him publicly at a game; after all, he has eyewitnesses to Maitland’s picking up the boy and DNA evidence, too. And yet . . . how can Maitland also be seen on video asking writer Harlen Coben a question at a writer’s conference he was attending at the same time far away from the murder scene, and how can his fingerprints be on a book he looked at in the conference hotel gift shop?

Notes on the Problem of Tone in Recent Movies

Note to readers: This post contains spoilers.

This Pixar animated fairy tale Brave has a lot of charm; it’s one of the few movies this summer that I’ve been able to send friends to. But it takes a wrong turn in the middle that’s almost disastrous. The heroine, a bright, tomboyish Scottish princess named Merida, has reached the age to be courted, but she has no interest in any of her suitors and she bests them easily at the archery competition that’s meant to determine which one is worthy of her hand. Merida hopes that she can win her mother’s sympathy but instead the queen is furious at her unladylike behavior. So – in the film’s most inventive sequence – the princess enlists the help of a witch who promises to deliver a potion that will alter the queen’s perspective. What it does is to transform Queen Elinor into a bear. The scenes that follow, in which Elinor continues to attempt to act in a queenly manner while her body keeps working against her (and while she’s unable to communicate except through gesture), are comical, and Merida’s efforts to keep her father, a celebrated bear hunter, from seeing Elinor while trying frantically to track down an antidote underscore the princess’s imagination and resourcefulness, certainly appropriate in a coming-of-age story. The problem is what we might call tonal follow-through.

Checkered: The Queen’s Gambit

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen's Gambit. (Photo: Phil Bray/Netflix)

At first, maybe even second, the hit new Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit seems fresh and exciting. The somber fairy-tale atmosphere of its early episodes portends something new, something important. The late 50s through the 60s settings are impeccably art-directed and handsomely shot (by Kai Koch and Steven Meisler, respectively); the soundtrack skillfully employs obscure, yet still familiar, pop music, with the odd classical composition (e.g., Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1”) thrown in for sophistication; and the creators make the shrewd choice of having their protagonist become a clothes horse as she ages, allowing for smashing retro fashions to be on display. (Hey, it worked like gangbusters for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.)

But The Queen’s Gambit isn’t content to be a fairy tale. Its story of an orphaned, institutionalized young girl from Kentucky who discovers a proclivity for the game of chess soon becomes mired in feminist clichés, and worse yet, turns into triumph-of-the-spirit sentimentality as our spunky young heroine, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy of Emma and The Witch), overcomes addiction and her own narcissism to succeed where no woman (and very few men) has succeeded before. Yawn.