As the title indicates, Contagion is a timely disaster epic that chronicles the rapid spread of a new strain of virus eluding the grasp of medical science. After SARS and the Bird Flu, it was about time to cash in on the widespread "disease" paranoia that has swept Western civilization for the greater benefits of Purell manufacturers and all cleaning products outfits. The received idea according to which extreme sanitation strengthens a people instead of weakening it has grown strong in recent years, and so does the film profit from it, tightening the screw in the heads of disease freaks with the help of alarming sub-titles mentioning the number of days elapsed since the beginning of the outbreak.
You know things are bad when they whip outthose orange bio-hazard suits
Day 1: ??? - Established early on as a major narrative tenet, the search for what happened on the first day of the titular event is a concern quickly relegated to the backseat, but re-emerging as a predictable, alarmist epilogue to the film.
Day 2: After a business trip in Hong Kong, Gwyneth Paltrow's character goes back home to Minneapolis by way of Chicago, where she meets with a former lover, infecting the man in question, her son and many Chinese locals in the process. This marks the beginning of a pandemic, which the domino effect sees spreading through Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas in as much time as it takes Danny Ocean to elaborate a foolproof scheme to rob a casino. Said domino effect is depicted using a fast-paced series of vignettes served with the upbeat tempo befitting the cool montage sequences from the Ocean films.
Days 3-150: People start dying and international health officials are mobilized to help isolate, analyze and eventually combat the virus at the heart of the pandemic, a unique bat-pig compound with a very short incubation period and devastating effects akin to those of a deadly attack of seizure (be sure to check out Gwyneth Paltrow dying on the kitchen floor while convulsing and foaming profusely at the mouth). The film vies to chronicle the evolution of the disease and of its cure through a boatload of weakly interrelated storylines featuring a boatload of A-list international actors. The disintegration of the social fabric and the human drama are not focuses here, but mere cogs in what is essentially the blandly expository, grossly alarmist depiction of a pandemic enforced with a rapid fire of fast-moving, wordy exposition scenes.
Exotic locales abound, as in the best crime capersI should've known what I bargained for when I sat down to see this big-budget disaster epic by Steven Soderbergh. I should've foreseen precisely what I would get. But still, I managed to be amazed by the director's reverence to previous money-making formulas, as exemplified by his imbuing the present film with the distinct airs of a crime caper. Seeing scientists in heavy bio-hazard suits walking in slow-motion to ear-blasting club music, you'd swear you were watching George Clooney strutting his stuff on some sumptuous casino floor. The same goes for the cohorts of health officials cruising through the streets of Hong Kong aboard shimmering luxury cars. Then, there's the nearly hilarious scene where a blatantly unconvincing Marion Cotillard tracks down the "movement" of the virus by spying on Gwyneth Paltrow through a series of security cameras posted on the walls of a HK game room. There's no escaping the memory of surveillance scenes from Soderbergh's other films when one is confronted with examples of such a weirdly formatted disaster epic. At any moment, it seems that the Ocean gang is about to come out of hiding and devise a brilliant scheme to put that nasty virus back in its place! Luckily, the ensemble is masterfully composed, intimate in the framing of its characters, and fast-moving enough to make you forget about the total lack of dramatic issues, and overbid of superficial science.
The first few shots should indicate precisely what to expect from this film: the music is loud and mostly meant to energize the often boring contents of the shots, the editing is fast and it fragments the film's universe into a myriad of anecdotal snippets gathered from all corners of the world. But most interestingly, the camera focuses almost voyeuristically on its characters, using close-ups of redenned faces and prostrated bodies to better delineate the myriad individual dramas unfolding here, or at least, the myriad of situations in which the virus is involved. Fortunately, this camera remains controlled, and it doesn't give in to the panic that it is supposed to portray, remaining at a comfortable distance from the action epics of lesser directors, such as J.J. Abrams, Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass.
The camera's proximity to the characters is the film's greatestasset and one of its rare attempts at humanizing the disease
The impressive ensemble cast (Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne...) successfully manages to interpret a plethora of flat, purely operative characters apparently devoid of the most basic humanity. And while the amount of talent at work here is undeniable, it is underused in roles best befitting TV series, where each character delivers interchangeable, over-witty lines of dialogue in an endless exchange of words akin to a stale, but nervously edited, political debate.
In that regard, one should look at the rhetorical tennis match set up between the righteous CDC head played by Laurence Fishburne, his self-sacrificing team of dedicated scientists, and the unethical blogger played by Jude Law, who, despite a credible tone, hardly compares with the current roster of right-wing pundits. In the event of a worldwide outbreak of killer viruses, you can expect such pundits and the powers that be to come at odds with far fiercer intents. You can also expect pharmaceutical companies to profit at a much larger extent, and FEMA to struggle helplessly all the while. Strangely, the present film doesn't capitalize on the nefarious influence of the health industry, nor on government incompetence in order to better cement the narrative, finding faults only in Jude Law's character for jumping in bed with one purveyor of holistic drugs, and for hampering the progress of the righteous, fully dedicated government scientists hard at work to solve the crisis. In fact, the film touches on crucial issues such as mass hysteria, drug approval processes and patent wars only superficially, taking a rather synthetic approach to the pandemic as a clearly delineated event, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This helps fit the film within the restrictive thriller mold, but it also traps it within that mold, unable to reach beyond the scope of disposable entertainment and into the realm of true affect.
While Soderbergh manages to capture some rather chilling images of death and mayhem, such as Gwyneth Paltrow's seizure attack, or the rising criminality in urban areas, he does so circumstantially, forwarding the plot purely chronologically, with little importance awarded to the characters' emotional state. That said, the film is almost completely devoid of dramatic tension, showcasing death as simply "something that happens" within the world of the film, like the execution of a henchman by James Bond. You will thus be surprised to see Matt Damon's character unable to shed a single tear for his decimated family, the corpses of which are shown in grim close-ups, with their grayish, chapped lips and open skulls making a mockery of their weak, fleshy shells. And you yourself will have a hard time being moved by the death of gorgeous Kate Winslet, who nearly makes us laugh with the revelation of her infection. Showing unflinching professionalism under fire, she reacts to the first symptoms of the disease by fast grabbing the phone and gathering information about the people she had contact with in the last day. Despite the inevitability of her death, she remains calm, and acts in order to better prevent the infecti0n from spreading, much like the cold professional of other Soderbergh films and not the human that she should become in that event. If it is any indication of the film's attitude toward its (far too numerous) characters, the reaction of the first doctor to come in contact with the disease is so dry as to make you shrug your shoulders in disbelief. "Sorry Mr. Damon, but your wife just suffered a fatal seizure of unknown origin. Please be directed to one of our anguish specialists". I guess that with half a billion dead across the globe, a single death is no more than a statistic. But then, the film's intimate framing of its protagonists is rendered absurd by such a conclusion...
Expect to see a lot more panicked telephone calls thanspurting blood and actual drama
All in all, Contagion is an enjoyable slice of high-class entertainment, mostly due to its fast pacing, shifting international locales and the sure hand of director Soderbergh at the helm. The latter is quite possibly the best mainstream director to currently work on mass-marketed drivel. But he is clearly not a sentimental type, more a cerebral type, focused exclusively on the narrative at hand, and not the characters within the narrative, making it advance fast and seamlessly, but leaving many a good souls behind in the process. And so, while his new film boasts the same superb production values as his Ocean films, it fails to rise above the televisual level in terms of dramatic intensity, which greatly impairs its efficiency as an intimate portrayal of average humans in a state of crisis.
2,5/5 This enjoyable, masterfully shot disaster epic is crafted just like a crime caper, with all the fast-talking, witty characters and sumptuous exotic locales that it involves. The result however, is that dramatic content is sacrificed at the profit of style.
