Contagion
Regal Union Square, September 20, 2011
Movie #70 for 2011
I like that director STEVEN SODERBERG is always surprising. Like the Coen brothers or Michael Winterbottom, he seems interested in making all kinds of movies (except, of course, of the Ocean’s series, which seemed to have funded everything that came after). People have been calling Contagion a “return to form” for Soderberg, which I think it a bit odd, since he doesn’t really have a form, at least not one that can be discerned from his back catalogue - it’s comparing apples and butterflies. I guess folks are referring to the similarities between Contagion and Soderberg’s 2000 drug film Traffic, for which he won a best director Oscar.
Like Traffic, Contagion is a piecemeal narrative molded into a story that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This time, the story of an aggressive viral disease and the search for a cure. But this isn’t a post-apocalyptic movie about how thin the veneer of civilized society is (although there is certainly a little bit of that), it’s more about how robust people can be in the face of a crisis, how they knuckle down and get on with things.
GWENYTH PALTOW returns home to Minneapolis from a business trip to Hong Kong feeling under the weather and promptly dies. Other people - in Hong Kong, Minneapolis and Chicago - also quickly become sick and die as the virus spreads. Meanwhile, LAURENCE FISHBURN, KATE WINSLET and JENNIFER EHLE at the Centre for Disease Control and MARION COTTILIARD at the World Health Organisation are trying to piece together the story of the virus, trace its origin and find an inoculation. This process takes months as more and more people get sick. Meanwhile, people like Paltrow’s husband MATT DAMON (pictured) and his daughter are trying to avoid infection and people like JUDE LAW’s Julian Assange-like character are muckraking.
The script moves very quickly - weighty topics like international policy and the commercial practices of pharmaceutical companies are briefly touched on and then forgotten - but the characters are remarkably well drawn for such a patchy ensemble story. Writer Scott Z. Burns and Soderberg are able to eloquently show enough of the character without having to explain their defining characteristics. The actors, obviously, also contribute to this enormously, and everyone does a great job (especially Damon and Ehle, and except for ELLIOT GOULD who is surprisingly wooden). Soderberg is his own director of photography, and the film's look is rich and striking.
While the structure and approach give the film pace and tension, it doesn’t leave much room for subtlety. Some parts of the film have an awkwardly moralistic tone when dealing with its 'bad guys': the immoral or greedy die justly, a justice compounded by the hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths they are somehow responsible for. It’s murky at best.
