Contagion
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Scott Z. Burns
Producers: Gregory Jacobs, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, Steven Soderbergh
Stars: Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anna Jacoby-Heron, Elliott Gould, Sanaa Lathan, John Hawkes, Bryan Cranston, Chin Han
Contagion works as a movie because it feels more than plausible; it feels inevitable. Modern society simply presents too great a window of opportunity for an enterprising virus to catapult around the world faster than we can map it, track it, and immunize against it. That one hasn’t yet is just probabilities.
There have been many plagues throughout history, and science has done its best to minimize the damage. As our science improves, so do the viruses. They, after all, are also fighting to survive and evolve. This thriller, directed by the prodigious Steven Soderbergh, chronicles the emergence of a frighteningly-successful new flu and humanity’s response as days turn to months and a handful of casualties becomes millions. Early on, a scientist identifies it as essentially the offspring of a chance meeting between a sick bat and a sick pig – no terrorist weapon, no evil plot, just virus kismet.
We open on Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a woman in an airport bar named Beth Emhoff, who is coughing. Beth claims to be jet-lagged. Below her, a caption appears, reading “Day 2”. That’s a nice nudge from Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum). Emhoff is returning from an overseas business trip to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) in Minnesota, and I don’t ruin anything you won’t see in the very early minutes of the movie to say that she will not prove immune to what will become known as the MEV-1 virus.
There’s nothing bizarre about what MEV-1 does – the symptoms are as ordinary as the holiday sniffles. It is the speed, the ease of spreading, and its lethality that are a step beyond earlier cousins; the rest is mercilessly banal, as Beth Emhoff goes into a seizure and flops her life away on the dull kitchen floor. Soderbergh lingers on it, like watching a fish at the bottom of a boat.
For much of the time, Contagion is like this, observing its cataclysm in too-clinical a manner to produce any response in the audience other than dread or cringing. It is just so remorselessly accurate – a thriller built not on superhuman stunts and ticking-clock deadlines but on implacable logistics and the chaotic noise of human error. Death enters inside the most ordinary and unthinking behavior; one very bright, very useful character played by an Oscar-winning movie star is struck down by hotel room service. After the final action we see in their life – good-hearted but pitiful and futile – they are not borne from the stage like sweet prince Hamlet, but taped up in plastic and tossed in a ditch.
Providing much of what emotion the movie can is Damon, typically earnest and excellent as a father who has lost so much and is trying to protect the daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) he still has and not drive her away in doing so. And there is one marvelous scene that bursts with feeling, in which, at a pivotal moment in the quest for a vaccine, a woman shows her courage to the man who taught it to her.
But the rest is a brisk world tour with the key players. Centers for Disease Control director Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to navigate bureaucracy, manage risk, and balance how much to tell a frightened public when he knows the cost of giving credibility to things half-understood. His associate, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), packs a bag for Minnesota to urgently track Beth’s recent movements and contacts – as one of the earliest victims, they are trying to discover ground zero by rewinding her final days. This drags out information which complicates Mitch’s grief. A World Health Organization doctor played by Marion Cotillard reviews security footage at an Asian casino – watching the now-dead interact and attempting to logic together, at each brush of contact, who was passer and passee.
And tromping around San Francisco with self-satisfied zeal is an anti-PHARMA blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who has a few things right and a few things wrong, but pastes it all together with strident assumptions about greed and collusion. This leads to a brief but fascinating little scene wherein a hedge fund representative (Randy Lowell), without even a nod or a wink, installs in Krumwiede the idea that his zeal can be profitable – much like how those talk radio hosts always preaching economic apocalypse segue seamlessly into commercials entreating you to buy gold.
It’s a parallel that enhances Contgation, demonstrating how a false belief can mutate, propagate through a population and, really, resist cure just like a virus; as a dense web of additional beliefs build atop the foundation of that first false one. People who let it past their defenses, in essence, quarantine themselves with their conspiracies away from the rest of humanity. At one point, shown lab results which contradict one of his earliest claims, Krumwiede is compelled to retort: “Well, of course YOUR lab would say that!” To allow for any other possibility would cost him too much.
The production, aided in every frame by Oscar-winning editor Stephen Mirrione, covers a broad ensemble and locations on three or four continents, on a budget that’s about a third of what gets tossed at your run-of-the-mill superhero movie these days. It’s a change-of-pace in terms of subject matter for Soderbergh, but a good match for his steady gaze and gift for broad-but-naturalistic color palettes. It is solid in all respects without being great; he has traded away the chance for epiphany or insight, and abandoned many opportunities for pathos, in exchange for relentless momentum. Cineaste that he is, he knows he is ultimately making a scary disease movie, and wants to make it as scary and disease-y as his equal desire not to insult our intelligence allows.
We see death, and panic, and looting, the true fragility of our social compact and the insidious way ordinary human contact can be made frightening. It is not gratuitously gruesome, although the filmmakers are not even done with pretty Gwyneth Paltrow after they’ve snuffed her. It’s not really about blood, it’s about sparing us the Hollywood world where nothing bad can happen to you if you are famous enough. One main character breaks a rule because his heart compels him to, like it would in any movie; only here the world doesn’t celebrate his act but sets him up for ruin – and you can understand their anger. That’s how I’d feel if I saw the empowered playing favorites while my neighbors were dying in their kitchens. But, as Contagion effectively reminds me, I would only be truly surprised if someone in his position acted any other way.