Complex Contagion Coughs Up the Scares
Director Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brokovich) and writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum), fresh off making their humorously surreal real-life black comedy The Informant!, reunite with the intricate and complex viral pandemic thriller Contagion. The movie is a layered and labyrinthine procedural, a gigantic what-if scenario depicting what would likely happen if some sort of untreatable super disease rapidly spread across the globe resulting in chaos, hysteria and human devastation on a massive, virtually unimaginable scale.
A viral pandemic sends the world into chaos in Contagion
To put it bluntly, Outbreak this movie is not. This isn’t some cheap parlor game where Dustin Hoffman can come swooping down from the sky in a helicopter and a single solitary monkey holds the key to humanities survival. No, Soderbergh and Burns are more interested in tackling this scenario from an almost unbearably direct and unambiguously straightforward journalistic perspective. The tackle the idea much in the same way Alan J. Pakula looked at Watergate in All the President’s Men or how Henry Hathaway put a lens to a ten-year-old murder case in Call Northside 777.
Basically, then, what we’re talking about as far as Soderbergh is concerned is Traffic but with viruses, the World Health Organization (WHO), hyperactive bloggers and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) taking the place of drug dealers, undercover cops and incorruptible judges searching desperately for their strung-out daughters. The director is attempting to use his talent for exactitude to both entertain and unsettle an audience while also educating them about potential medical dangers the world is unprepared to face, assembling a massive cast of Hollywood heavyweights to assist him in the doing so.
By and large the filmmaker meets with success. Contagion is chilling, the first half in particular so insidiously unsettling I found myself wanting to bathe in gallons of hand sanitizer even though I knew I was still a heck of a long way from the end. But it almost goes without saying that Soderbergh and Burns have bitten off a bit more than they can chew, and at a briskly paced 105 minutes there’s far too much going on for the film to easily reconcile or deal with considering the picture’s relatively brief running time.
The film works best when it focuses on two of its main plot strands, the first involving Minnesota family man Mithc Emhoff (Matt Damon) whose globetrotting wife Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) may have been patient zero and is doing all he can to make sure his teenage daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron) remains safe while the second concerns the head of the CDC Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), his driven associate Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) trying to deal with things on the ground in Minnesota and the head scientist Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) he’s got doing all she can to try and find a cure. When the movie sticks to these two plot threads, when it focuses directly upon them, it can’t help but soar like no tomorrow, the human terror at the center of both strands intimately, unnervingly palpable.
The thing is, the movie goes out of its way to try and throw as much into the mix as it can. We’ve got a WHO scientist (Marion Cotillard) on the ground in Hong Kong trying to retrace Beth’s steps who ends up getting kidnapped by a scared village eager for the antidote to the virus, a conspiracy nut blogger (Jude Law) intent on trying to prove drug companies are in collusion with the governments of the world and a pair of government military (Bryan Cranston) and Homeland Security (Enrico Colantoni) worried that the unleashing of this plague is some sort of terrorist attack. From there we’ve got interactions with wives, coworkers, friends and all sorts of other various sorts of people, all of whom have a part to play in the proceedings and almost none of whom are fleshed out enough to make their situations resonate beyond a superficial level.
All the same, Contagion works. The tension that is systematically ratcheted up as the film progresses is lusciously unsettling, and if anyone were to have coughed or have sneezed in the packed screening room I saw the picture in I swear a third of the audience would have screamed, jumped out of their seats and madly run from the auditorium (and I mean that as a compliment). Cliff Martinez’s (Solaris) ambient score adds a chilling accompaniment to all that is taking place upon the screen, while the director’s camerawork (Soderbergh once again his own cinematographer) is some of the finest and the most intimately scintillating I’ve seen all year.
Could the film have been better? Yes, I think so, and this is one of the few cases where I actually think an additional 30 minutes would have transformed a good motion picture into something borderline magnificent. But in the end Soderbergh and Burns get the job done, accomplishing a great deal of what they’ve set out to do. Contagion got under my skin, made me itch in luxurious terror as it moves from scene to scene. Not to resort to cliché, but the flick coughs up the scares, and it took me a good hour after seeing it for the hair on my arms to relax and the sweat on my brow to dissipate.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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