Side Effects, the latest (and very probably last) feature film from director Steven Soderbergh, is a twisted head-trip of a tale about psychopharmacology gone wrong.
It was also inspired by a man who claimed he was a vampire.
In the spring of 2000, Side Effects writer Scott Z. Burns went to Bellevue Hospital to meet Sasha Bardey, a forensic psychiatrist who worked with mentally ill patients, some of whom had been sent from Rikers Island jail. Bardey had offered his services as an adviser for a show Burns was working on called Wonderland, which depicted life in a psychiatric institution. They were discussing Bardey’s work when someone came to his door.
‘One of the medical students came in and said, “Um, there’s a vampire on the floor.” He looked at me and he goes, “Do you want to go meet a vampire?” And I said, “Sure, I guess.”‘ — writer Scott Z. Burns “One of the medical students came in and said, ‘Um, there’s a vampire on the floor,'” Burns told Wired. “[Bardey] looked at me and he goes, ‘Do you want to go meet a vampire?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I guess.'”
The self-proclaimed vampire, Burns recalled, had been brought in for trying to attack somebody in Central Park and was “going on this really frightening rant about planet Earth.” The medical student believed that the man was schizophrenic and dissociative, but when Bardey looked at the toxicology report he determined the guy was actually just coming off of years of substance abuse.
“That part of his job, that teasing out of what is mental illness, and what is behavior manifested for personal gain – what people call malingering – and what is just plain-old garden-variety evil struck me as being one of the most amazing jobs I could ever imagine,” Burns said. “That’s where this long fascination with this began.”
Burns and Bardey became friends, and over the course of nearly a decade they developed the script that would become Side Effects, a film where a psychiatrist played by Jude Law must also determine exactly where a patient’s control over their behavior ends, and where the influence of drugs begins.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points to follow.)
In Side Effects, out Friday, Emily Taylor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Rooney Mara) plays a New York woman whose husband Martin (Soderbergh fave Channing Tatum) has recently been released from prison after doing a four-year turn for insider trading. His return, while welcome, brings on a wave of depression and self-harm attempts that her psychiatrist Dr. Banks treats with the fictional drug Ablixa. As you might imagine if you’ve seen the trailer or read the title, the drug has unforeseen side effects.
On the surface, Side Effects seems like a psychological thriller about the dark side of society’s use (and perhaps over-use) of antidepressants like Zoloft and Effexor, which get name-dropped in the film. But beyond that, it’s a brain-bender that doesn’t reveal who’s really mentally disturbed until the final frame, and isn’t afraid to portray the problematic elements in the world of psychiatry.
“The reality is, I don’t want to depict psychiatry in a lily-white way. We make mistakes; there are psychiatrists who lose their licenses because they crossed those boundaries,” Bardey told Wired. “I think it’s better that we show psychiatry in an honest way so that we can demystify it.”
There is a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, message within the film that psychiatry is ultimately a business, and even the most well-meaning practitioners still have to eat. In one telling scene, Dr. Banks is confronted by his partners about a patient who has been arrested for an incident related to her medication that could have fallout both for Banks and the firm. When he counters that his name will be cleared and people will understand he’s not at fault, his partner responds, “That may be how rational people see it, but we don’t see a great many rational people here.”
So is there a bigger message in Side Effects about the state of mental health in the United States? Burns said it’s “less about social commentary and more about verisimilitude.”
‘The reality is, I don’t want to depict psychiatry in a lily-white way. We make mistakes – there are are psychiatrists who lose their licenses because they crossed those boundaries.’ — psychiatrist Sasha Bardey “That being said, when you make a movie you do have your own biases. And I think when you look around our country it’s not that we’re necessarily over-prescribed … but what is alarming to me is that there are people who may not really be suffering from clinical depression — who may just be sad, and we’ve declared war on sadness with pills. I don’t know that the people who watch ads on TV are always patient and introspective enough to make that distinction. And I don’t know that we should expect corporations that exist to make money to draw those distinctions on our behalf.”
The “I’ll-have-what-he’s-having” attitude towards prescription medication, as Burns calls it, permeates Side Effects. Characters discuss what antidepressants have worked for them in the past, and psychiatrists opine about patients who get off on taking the new big thing in psychopharmacology. But Bardey notes that even though in recent years he’s noticed an increase in patients asking for drugs by name, it’s not as dangerous as it may sound.
“It’s a double-edged sword. Because on one hand, it’s good to have an informed consumer. It’s good to be able to talk to someone who has done their research and understands — that means they have more right-sized expectations,” Bardey said. “However, if someone comes in with this idea of ‘I have the ad in my hand and I want to be as happy as the person in the ad’ then you’ve got a bit of a tougher road to go down.”
The necessity of psychiatrists to be able to properly treat patients — and the myriad grey areas involved in that — is at the core of Side Effects, which has the ability to turn the tables more than once to reveal that anyone can have mental problems, whether they’re doctors or patients. (Thank crafty work by Mara for that last part. According to Bardey she essentially had to learn how to demonstrate multiple diagnoses at the same time.) The “roller-coaster” of dashed audience expectations in the film was a huge part of Burns’ goal for the movie.
Side Effects — for all of its mental gymnastics and twists — also has the weight of being director Soderbergh’s final film. That’s a weighty notion, but Burns — who also contributed the scripts for Soderbergh’s Contagion and The Informant! — says he doesn’t feel that added any more stress to the film. Plus, he adds that Soderbergh plans to direct a play he’s written soon. But that doesn’t mean he won’t miss the man’s films, just a little bit.
“It’s really hard to get movies made, especially movies that try and break the rules. And from the very beginning, you know, Steven has been the most iconoclastic American filmmaker,” Burns said. “I don’t know of anybody else who has tried as many different things for people to sit and watch and eat popcorn at.”
Side Effects hits theaters Friday.
