CONTAGION
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Scott Z. Burns
Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould
In CONTAGION, Steven Soderbergh’s (THE INFORMANT!, OCEAN’S 11-13, SOLARIS, OUT OF SIGHT, THE LIMEY, KAFKA, SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE) latest (but by no means final), a virus-themed techno-thriller/disaster film, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Minnesota native and business traveler, returns from a trip to Hong Kong to her home in the Minneapolis suburbs with, at first anyway, symptoms of a cold, a flu, or even just jet lag. She’s dead, however, before realizing or learning that she’s “Patient Zero,” carrying (or “carried” to be more accurate) a new, heretofore undiscovered virus, dubbed “MEV-1” by government scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) outside Atlanta, Georgia. Highly contagious, MEV-1, transferred primarily by physical contact or by touching objects infected by the virus’ carriers, spreads exponentially thanks to the wonders of modern transportation and globalization regardless of real or imaginary borders, inexorably, inevitably threatening to destabilize economies and governments within weeks or months of the initial outbreak.
Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (THE INFORMANT!) center CONTAGION on several characters, including Mitch (Matt Damon), Beth’s stay-at-home husband, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), the head of the CDC and the CDC’s chief spokesman/messaging officer, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), a CDC scientist Cheever sends to Minneapolis to investigate and, hopefully, contain the initial MEV-1 outbreak, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), a World Organization Health Organization scientist sent to China to trace the origin of the MEV-1 virus, and Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a San Francisco-based, conspiracy-obsessed reporter-blogger. A San Francisco-based research scientist, Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould), provides a key contribution to understanding the virus, but disappears after two scenes. Another CDC researcher, Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle), and her colleague, Dr. David Eisenberg (Demetri Martin), desperately attempt to discover a vaccine before the virus wipes out millions, if not billions.
With characters spread around the globe, Soderbergh’s cross-cutting between characters and their respective plights, character depth and development tends to take second or tertiary position. Shifting from the macro- to the micro-level gives us an at times exhilarating top-down, God’s-eye view on events as they unfold, but at a price: characters are defined almost exclusively by their job function or their narrative function. Damon’s character, an MEV-1 survivor (he’s immune), desperately concerned about his daughter (she may or may not be immune) retreats, partly by choice, partly by circumstance, into his home, a witness via TV shows and his living room window of the breakdown in social, political, and civic institutions. When introduced, Gould’s character seems poised for significant screen time, but he disappears early on, never to return. Absent for significant periods of screen time, Cotillard’s reappearance comes as a surprise (as in moviegoers might forget she’s in CONTAGION).
Soderbergh, however, isn’t particularly concerned with character depths. He assumes that the scale and magnitude of the pandemic, the debilitating, deadly effect the fast-moving pandemic has on characters onscreen or off, and the clinical, methodical focus on procedure, on discovering the origin of the origin, of discovering how it works and spreads, containing the virus, and ultimately, finding a cure or vaccine, are sufficient to engage and maintain audience interest. He’s only partly right. When, inevitably, the narrative focuses to the search for a vaccine, and later, the ins-and-outs of disseminating the vaccine to the general population, narrative tension dissipates, ultimately vanishing in the seeming return to normality, minus a few hundred million bodies, of course.
If CONTAGION has any overarching, real-world lessons to impart on audiences, it’s this (a) wash your hands as frequently as possible, even if they bleed, and (b) avoid exchanging bodily fluids with loved ones and non-loved ones (or something along those lines). Cutting off physical contact, which Cheever euphemistically describes “social distancing,” an already present phenomenon (we live much of our lives virtually) helps to staunch the spread of the virus at the cost of interpersonal relationships. In short, Howard Hughes was right about the hand-washing thing. On a more serious note, CONTAGION succeeds in exploring what a worldwide, viral pandemic (sans zombies or deranged, blood-soaked automatons) would look like. That CONTAGION feels like an episode of CSI writ (mini-mega budget) large (Fishburne’s presence can’t help but add to the feeling) may or may not have been intentional, but it’s a conclusion that can be described as both obvious and inescapable, much like the fictional, if reality-based, virus in CONTAGION that threatens to vastly diminish or, quite possibly, wipe out humanity.
