What was Steven Soderbergh thinking? Roman Polanski Repulsion was a classic about madness.
Soderbergh’s movie has a similar fascination with objects (in this case
a model boat)--and blood. But the subject is feigned madness, something Ophelia was once
accused of, that is now presented in what is nothing less than a Elizabethan/Jacobean revenge tragedy about the pharmaceutical business. The plot is a
failed cocktail of news headlines that goes as awry as all the failed combinations
of SSRI’s that are supposed account for the erratic behavior of its central
character Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara). Still the bald-faced contrivance is
rather shocking in a filmmaker of Soderbergh’s stature, though some of the blame could fall on the shoulders of the screenplay writer, Scott Z. Burns.You have hedge fund
trading and a new anti-depressant called Ablixa, which may have suicidal and
homicidal effects on the wrong patient and also a doctor on the payroll of a
big drug company. Sound familiar? Lines from William Styron’s memoir of
depression, Visible Darkness are
quoted in the service of a supposed suspense plot, in which Jonathan Banks, the
well-intentioned British psychiatrist (Jude Law) is driven so crazy by the
ludicrous criminality he’s caught up in that he picks ups a Thorazine loaded dagger. Soderbergh has announced his retirement from film, having made 26 films by the age of 50. Too bad a pharmaceutically oriented psychiatrist couldn’t have offered him some sort of a drug that makes once talented film directors
stop before they go over the edge.
