Contagion (2011)

As a deliberate and chilling account of how a single virus can slowly send the world into chaos, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is remarkably effective. In the realms of storytelling character development, it is less fulfilling. It does an admirable job of describing and illustrating the struggles each of its characters face in a world that’s falling apart, but it makes little effort to tell you who these people are and why we should care. It’s not that they don’t feel real—on the contrary, the entire film feels startlingly plausible, even probable—but none of the stories are given enough time to work individually. At times, Contagion seems like a great two-and-a-half hour movie trapped inside a very good 100-minute package. Soderbergh clearly accomplishes what he set out to do, but if he had some room to go for more it could have been downright transcendent.

Contagion is certainly an ensemble piece; following a large cast of characters as they deal with the disaster in their own unique way. Among the first victims of the virus is Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is infected during a trip to Hong Kong. Her husband (Matt Damon) then has to protect his family as it continues to spread. Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is then sent to figure out how and if Beth spread the disease to others. Meanwhile, the likes of Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and others are searching for a solution/cure. Also, there’s popular blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who seems intent on causing as much trouble as possible. Marion Cotillard is also involved as Dr. Leonora Orantes, who tries to discover exactly where the disease began.

Yet Contagion is not about these people so much as it’s about individual moments that illustrate its eerily plausible nightmare scenario. He is usually sure to keep any real emotion at arm’s length, a decision that alternately augments and diminishes the film’s impact. On the one hand, watching how society as a whole crumbles in the midst of the disease is truly affecting, and some sequences evoke the best moments of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. This is not a film with a very positive view of humanity, and as the characters each face the possibility of death around every corner they become more and more violent and defensive. After a while, death by gunshot seems just as plausible as death by virus. On the other hand, several significant deaths don’t seem to carry the startling impact they should. Perhaps this is the point—a famous actor dying is just another casualty in the Contagion universe—but it still feels a bit rushed and unsatisfying. Soderbergh has the unenviable task of keeping several balls in the air while also telling a larger story, and each brief failure is more than atoned for with a handful of gut-wrenching sequences, many of which belong to Damon.

There are two contagious diseases at work here. The first is the central virus itself, but the second—as the tagline is sure to remind you—is fear. This is a situation that becomes uncontrollable before anybody has a chance to think, and Soderbergh brilliantly illustrates how it doesn’t take much for people to start freaking out and looting the supermarket. In Contagion, some characters even thrive on fear. (The longer the virus hangs around, the better business Law’s website is sure to get.) Technology, airplanes and the Internet have made it remarkably simple for people and information to travel around the world in the blink of an eye. If a virus were to latch on to just one of them, it would only be a matter of days before there was a victim on every side of the world. There is no one who could hope to contain something this catastrophic. Even if a cure were found, it would be a long time before the world went back to anything resembling normal. When Soderbergh deals with ideas like this, Contagion is downright fantastic.

Each story in the film is often fascinating, but within the confines of a mainstream Hollywood release Soderbergh doesn’t quite have the time to explore each thread to its fullest extent. An even better version of Contagion might have been significantly longer; a film where Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns gave each character’s arc a satisfying and thorough beginning, middle and end. (He could have even gone the Pulp Fiction route and told them all in chapters.) Contagion could have also made for a riveting season of serialized television, where the slow spread of the virus is documented over the course of 13-or-so episodes. As it is, it cannot be denied that the film is frequently terrific, but it still seems just a tad too compressed to work on every level. Perhaps my fixation on what this story could have been is overshadowing everything I loved about Contagion, but I can’t shake the feeling that it was hurt by the constraints of its own medium. Either way, Contagion is one of the scariest and most realistic disaster movies made in recent memory. This is something that could happen at any moment, and Soderbergh makes one point very clear: in the case of an outbreak like this, there is just about nothing we could do to stop it. We could only hope to survive, wait and be there for the long recovery.

GRADE: B+