Contagion movie review: cold, clinical and compelling
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Reliably unpredictable director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Oceans Eleven, Traffic, The Limey) tries his hand at a rarely attempted genre: the disease disaster pic.
Soderbergh directs Contagion with the stern unspeculative approach of a politician sticking to the line on a tricky issue: no bombast, no spectacle, no flamboyant movements. Instead, carefully guarded responses to complicated situations.
The film attempts to realistically depict the madness, confusion, death, despair and blood-eyed panic that would ensue if a new super disease spread across the globe like wildfire. It attempts to second-guess how people — particularly authorities and vested interests — would respond, the channels through which they would argue and bicker and most importantly (for Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns) how the situation would become politicised.
Soderbergh and Burns care about the problem of their eponymous contagion — where it came from, how treatment could be distributed, which round tables would make the big calls, etc — much more than the poor sods who become infected, their lips turned parched and grey, their complexion like Marilyn Manson’s after a bender and a blood transfusion.
This approach provides the film an interesting vantage point and a cold, dead heart.
Grieving husband and protective father Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) is the closest the film has to a protagonist, but the fractured storyline makes it clear early on that anybody can die at any moment.
A huge A list cast do a good job pretending not be famous. Damon is particularly resonant, neatly emitting the vibes of a cautious parent whose control over tragic situations has escalated well beyond his reach, without over accentuating the terribleness of his character’s predicament. The remaining cast includes Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, whose character is pried open in more ways than one.
Contagion regularly reminds us it is both coldly contemporary and based in a coldly contemporary world, from the steely look of its cinematography (shot by Soderbergh) to splashes of web 2.0 and global connectivity noncommittally strewn throughout the story. There’s the power of a blogger to expose official secrets, some mentions of Twitter and Youtube, depictions of news and disease trotting the globe in minutes, etcetera.
In its determination not to pander to audience expectations, the film carries a whiff of Aleksandr Mindadze’s Chernobyl-set Innocent Saturday, which took the experiment to extremes. A disaster loomed in the background while the characters did little other than drink, dance and argue, the cameras perched at intoxicatingly close proximity. This created the means for an intriguing intellectual exercise and an infuriating experience for the audience.
In some ways Contagion is a daring film: no three act structure, no anchor performance, no sentimental resolutions and plenty of compelling moments. In others it emits a deathly waft of bland, sometimes plain bad writing, particularly in a structural sense. The narrative’s order of events places inordinate weight on where the story-springboard disease came from, for example, when that was never even remotely the most interesting question.
If taken as an extremely long introduction to a work that was never finished, Contagion plays very well. It’s a tense, nail chewing, intelligently configured opening act. But where’s the rest of the film?
Contagion’s Australian theatrical release date: October 20, 2011.
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Working in public health, and having always aspired to be Kate Winslet, this is the best movie I have seen about a very real nightmare scenario. I almost had flashbacks to some of the early meetings about H1N1.
The problem with running a narrative in these movies is that the threat is abstract – really they are movies in which the antihero is a bug and has very little dialog. You just have to watch and say “oooh, look how gnarly those symptoms are..” This gets boring unless you want to award points for how good a seizure Paltrow does (9.5), and is usually resolved by improbable attacks of epidemic zombiism and/or really dramatic public health interventions like bombing a village and chasing contacts around in a helicopter (ala Outbreak). Even this movie goes for the third option of heroically finding a vaccine. This virus is clearly very close to Nipah on crack, and that virus was discovered in 1998 with no vaccine currently existant. See also dengue, H5N1, anthrax mostly etc
I agree its a cold, clinical story. My view is that if it isn’t cold and clinical, and you can identify with a protagonist in a story about a pandemic then the movie has missed the point. The point of these diseases is that you are not special, you are part of a herd and you just hope the lion picks someone else. This is a fight of society against nature which can only be won or lost collectively. It is an affront to everything we are told about our individualism, importance to the world and entitlement as rich citizens of the planet. These situations reverse these beliefs we hold dear into evils which prevent us from acting collectively in our best interests.
I think its a story everyone should see, because it is true of a lot of very real threats to our safety. Its about as friendly as a the stainless steel decor of a path lab to watch, but that the point.
Great comment Altakoi. When I eventually see the movie I’ll bear what you’ve said in mind.
I’d be interested if it has made Luke rethink his own opinion of the movie.
Altrakoi — thanks for an interesting and insightful comment, which resonates particularly given it came from somebody working in the same broad industry the film is set around. This means of course your opinion is coloured by your profession/experiences, that you appreciate certain things others may not, and I don’t mean to suggest this is a bad thing.
We both agree that Contagion is a cold and clinical story, and that it explores a tricky situation thoughtfully. I get your point vis-a-vis “you are not special, you are part of a herd” but disagree with the assertion that that somehow removes the need or desire to have a character the audience identifies with strongly on an emotional level. I think you can make both points.
Also, as articulated in my review, the story structure placed an inordinate amount of weight on where the virus came from. Is that really interesting? I think it missed the point outlined by its own standards: the film is supposed to be about complexities, not simplicities, and by ending in such a way it failed to deliver.
There is one word for this movie.
Pointless.
Character building starts and is then cut short. Government and corporations are the ‘good guys’ – there is no plot twist and how on earth they knew the catalyst for the infection is beyond ridiculous.
The ending reminded me of Law Abiding Citizen, where the protagonist who should of won – doesn’t.
No suspense, very little action, no emotion towards any of the characters just an empty film.
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