Side Effects (15)

HHHH

Dir: Steven Soderbergh

With: Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum

Runtime: 106 minutes

A FILM review is not a natural home for a mayday, unless it is to alert the public to the latest dire British comedy heading their way like a runaway train packed with slurry. In the case of the tricksy, shrewd, highly entertaining Side Effects, directed by Steven Soderbergh, another exception must be made.

Seeking artistic freedom outside the Hollywood system, Soderbergh has said this will be his last feature film as a director.

When you see it, and enjoy the craftsmanship, you too will want to don an oversize T-shirt and join the SOS – Save our Soderbergh – fight.

The Oceans and Magic Mike helmer might have decided he can live without cinema, but on the evidence of this thriller cinema will be a far poorer place without him.

Starring Jude Law as a psychiatrist and Rooney Mara as the patient he treats, Side Effects is at once a thoroughly modern picture and an old-fashioned one. In dealing with the antidepressant pill popping society, where happiness is deemed only a prescription away, it has a subject as fresh as today's headlines.

But Soderbergh deals with the matter in a way that mixes the swagger of classic noir with the kind of intelligence for which Seventies thrillers were celebrated. He does such a convincing job bringing it together one half expects Barbara Stanwyck or Gene Hackman to hover into view at some point. Instead we have Mara, Law, Channing Tatum and Catherine Zeta-Jones channelling Joan Crawford as if her life depended on it.

Together it makes for a stylish, clever, thought-provoking movie – one that has its hokier moments, admittedly, but they can be forgiven when set aside the grand cinematic fare that is on offer.

Mara, last seen in the US remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, here plays Emily Taylor, Woman with Problems. Emily's husband Martin (Channing Tatum), is in prison serving a sentence for insider trading, a crime, she says, which "might as well be murder" for how people react.

With Martin released and joining her in New York City, the one-time glamour couple can start to climb back up the ladder again, but for now she is working in a lowly job and feeling chronically sad, and he is unemployed.

Enter, at this point, Dr Jonathan Banks, played by Jude Law. Dr Banks thinks he has just the pill for what ails Emily – a drug, it just so happens, he is being paid to try out. Emily is a willing guinea pig, but will the magic pills make everything right again?

Mara's waif-like Emily could not be further from her kick-ass character in Dragon Tattoo, but she handles the shift easily.

Tatum, likewise, is miles away from the stripper he played in Magic Mike, another Soderbergh film. He too is cool and convincing as the husband trying to make up for past mistakes. From Terence Stamp in The Limey to George Clooney in Solaris, Soderbergh has a winning tendency to reveal the more surprising sides of actors.

It's never been more so than here with Jude Law, who also worked with Soderbergh on Contagion. Law has had a funny old career, though "funny" would not be the word that came to mind if you had the misfortune to sit through Sleuth, Alfie or one of his other duds.

In Side Effects, given the right director and the right script by Scott Z Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Informant, Contagion), Law shines. There is an occasional moment when he lapses into that quizzical, head-to-one-side/squirrel-just-sat-on-a-carpet-tack look, but on the whole he breezes his way through the film.

New York is given a lick of gloss too as the characters shimmy in and out of glass towers and tastefully hidden consulting rooms.

Zeta-Jones receives the Soderbergh sheen as a fellow psychiatrist called upon by Law for advice. While she goes at this with the same gusto as she did Chicago, and Tatum shows again why he is one of the business's hottest rising stars, Side Effects is the Mara-Law show, and what a high old time they have.

Along the way, Soderbergh has gentle digs at the American way of healthcare, and the price being paid for the happiness part of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". There is no preaching, just points made in passing.

That is vintage Soderbergh, delivering films as entertaining as they are thought-provoking, as smart as they are stylish.

It is to be hoped the reports of his retirement from filmmaking have been exaggerated. He believes there is a creative life to be had outwith Hollywood. Given his other talents, painting among them, he is probably right. Film, though, wouldn't be half as much fun without him. SOS.