It starts with a handshake or a shared ride home from the airport, manifests itself as a cough or a sore throat, and ends with its victim twitching on the floor, dead within an hour or two. “Contagion” is a film about viruses: how they spread, how they affect the body, how they are stopped — or, as is the case for most of the running time here, how they are not stopped. But it’s also about the transmission of other things that are even less tangible than rogue pathogens — terror, misinformation, compassion, capital.
Steven Soderbergh’s newest film opens on the second day of a global pandemic. A jet-lagged Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns home from a business trip in Hong Kong and an assignation in Chicago to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), her son and their spacious house in suburban Minneapolis. Soon she’s collapsed, dead before Mitch has even properly registered that she’s sick. Their son quickly succumbs as well, and Mitch finds himself quarantined as doctors from all over the world try to figure out what exactly is killing people in places as far-flung as London, Tokyo and Frankfurt.
At Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the man in charge is Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishburne), the sort of benign executive who remembers the names of the building’s janitors and whose steady authority is the government’s sturdiest counterweight against panic. Which ensues anyway, of course — as the virus spreads, police officers desert, civilians riot, and shrill anxiety creeps into the voices of public officials across the globe as scientists like Kate Winslet’s Dr. Erin Mears and Marion Cotillard’s Dr. Leonora Orantes are dispatched into the field to figure out from where the pandemic may have originated and how it might be halted.
“Contagion” may seem like a horror film or another Hollywood foray into large-scale disaster fetishism, but in practice it’s a much calmer film, if equally terrifying. Soderbergh has always been a director with an uncommon gift for pacing and spacing — he’s at ease with baroque plots, ensemble casts, crowded, information-rich frames and parallel storylines that never quite converge. “Contagion” is as studious in examining how people share elevators, airport lounges and other public spaces as it is in diagramming how germs can spread across multiple continents in a matter of hours. Whether it’s Paltrow’s Beth swanning her way through a casino, blowing on dice and taking photos, or Damon’s Mitch waiting nervously on a FEMA breadline, measuring the distance between himself and his neighbors, Soderbergh uses spacial relations as a way of dramatizing the arbitrary, unspoken rules that govern everyday human interaction. We are all crammed together on the planet and are somehow OK with it — until suddenly, we’re not.
Jude Law plays a conspiracy-minded blogger whose early posting of a video of a man dying on a Tokyo bus goes viral, but “Contagion” mostly avoids the more obvious parallels between the ways information and diseases spread. Paradoxically, it is the more intimate forms of sharing, Soderbergh suggests, that can cause the most damage — the secret email address Beth uses to contact her lover, which hides their relationship; the moment of weakness Fishburne’s Dr. Cheever has when he breaks his own rules to call a loved one and tell her to flee a coming quarantine; and the eerie, heartbreaking spectacle of Mitch’s surviving daughter sneaking out of the house to make out with a neighbor in the snow. The thing most terrifying here, more so even than a virus, is human nature, which persists in its follies and irrationalities even after the stakes become life or death.
Winslet’s character is the sort to arrive at the snowbound Minneapolis airport in pursuit of a deadly virus while forgetting to bring a winter coat. “Don’t want you to catch cold,” says the official from the Department of Health who picks her up. But she’s a driven professional for whom work has long since trumped life. Meanwhile Mitch devotes his every waking hour to keeping his daughter alive, no matter what the cost. For the living, normality and routine become something to be mourned as much as the dead, as they walk down debris-clogged streets and fight over resources that are growing scarcer by the day. “Why can’t they invent a shot that keeps time from passing?” asks Mitch’s daughter, who is well aware of what she’s losing, even in survival.
After nearly a decade of charming but flawed Hollywood entertainments (the latter two “Oceans” films, “The Good German”) and more personal, comparatively informal diversions (“The Girlfriend Experience,” “Solaris”), Soderbergh has made his most complete, if not his best, film in years. His ensemble cast is not only exceedingly famous but exceedingly good. And his storytelling, with its digital datelines and situation rooms and military trucks rolling into riot-wracked cities, is soothingly familiar, even when his film’s ideas are not.
“Contagion” takes a close look at a big world, where the bulldozers of multinational corporations plumb the jungle in one place as their executives gladhand their way through meetings hundreds or thousands of miles away. At the end, perhaps, the movie falters as it attempts to find its way back to a human scale after gliding around the globe for so long from such a high vantage point. But even this is a telling failure. Once you’ve seen how inexorably connected you are to faraway and minute mutations over which you have no control, it’s hard to feel like the makeshift comforts of our daily lives will do much for any of us when things decide to break bad.
Ratings
ROTTEN TOMATOES
81%
MORE ON THIS MOVIE
IMDB
Steven Soderbergh’s newest film opens on the second day of a global pandemic. A jet-lagged Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns home from a business trip in Hong Kong and an assignation in Chicago to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), her son and their spacious house in suburban Minneapolis. Soon she’s collapsed, dead before Mitch has even properly registered that she’s sick. Their son quickly succumbs as well, and Mitch finds himself quarantined as doctors from all over the world try to figure out what exactly is killing people in places as far-flung as London, Tokyo and Frankfurt.
At Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the man in charge is Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishburne), the sort of benign executive who remembers the names of the building’s janitors and whose steady authority is the government’s sturdiest counterweight against panic. Which ensues anyway, of course — as the virus spreads, police officers desert, civilians riot, and shrill anxiety creeps into the voices of public officials across the globe as scientists like Kate Winslet’s Dr. Erin Mears and Marion Cotillard’s Dr. Leonora Orantes are dispatched into the field to figure out from where the pandemic may have originated and how it might be halted.
“Contagion” may seem like a horror film or another Hollywood foray into large-scale disaster fetishism, but in practice it’s a much calmer film, if equally terrifying. Soderbergh has always been a director with an uncommon gift for pacing and spacing — he’s at ease with baroque plots, ensemble casts, crowded, information-rich frames and parallel storylines that never quite converge. “Contagion” is as studious in examining how people share elevators, airport lounges and other public spaces as it is in diagramming how germs can spread across multiple continents in a matter of hours. Whether it’s Paltrow’s Beth swanning her way through a casino, blowing on dice and taking photos, or Damon’s Mitch waiting nervously on a FEMA breadline, measuring the distance between himself and his neighbors, Soderbergh uses spacial relations as a way of dramatizing the arbitrary, unspoken rules that govern everyday human interaction. We are all crammed together on the planet and are somehow OK with it — until suddenly, we’re not.
Jude Law plays a conspiracy-minded blogger whose early posting of a video of a man dying on a Tokyo bus goes viral, but “Contagion” mostly avoids the more obvious parallels between the ways information and diseases spread. Paradoxically, it is the more intimate forms of sharing, Soderbergh suggests, that can cause the most damage — the secret email address Beth uses to contact her lover, which hides their relationship; the moment of weakness Fishburne’s Dr. Cheever has when he breaks his own rules to call a loved one and tell her to flee a coming quarantine; and the eerie, heartbreaking spectacle of Mitch’s surviving daughter sneaking out of the house to make out with a neighbor in the snow. The thing most terrifying here, more so even than a virus, is human nature, which persists in its follies and irrationalities even after the stakes become life or death.
Winslet’s character is the sort to arrive at the snowbound Minneapolis airport in pursuit of a deadly virus while forgetting to bring a winter coat. “Don’t want you to catch cold,” says the official from the Department of Health who picks her up. But she’s a driven professional for whom work has long since trumped life. Meanwhile Mitch devotes his every waking hour to keeping his daughter alive, no matter what the cost. For the living, normality and routine become something to be mourned as much as the dead, as they walk down debris-clogged streets and fight over resources that are growing scarcer by the day. “Why can’t they invent a shot that keeps time from passing?” asks Mitch’s daughter, who is well aware of what she’s losing, even in survival.
After nearly a decade of charming but flawed Hollywood entertainments (the latter two “Oceans” films, “The Good German”) and more personal, comparatively informal diversions (“The Girlfriend Experience,” “Solaris”), Soderbergh has made his most complete, if not his best, film in years. His ensemble cast is not only exceedingly famous but exceedingly good. And his storytelling, with its digital datelines and situation rooms and military trucks rolling into riot-wracked cities, is soothingly familiar, even when his film’s ideas are not.
“Contagion” takes a close look at a big world, where the bulldozers of multinational corporations plumb the jungle in one place as their executives gladhand their way through meetings hundreds or thousands of miles away. At the end, perhaps, the movie falters as it attempts to find its way back to a human scale after gliding around the globe for so long from such a high vantage point. But even this is a telling failure. Once you’ve seen how inexorably connected you are to faraway and minute mutations over which you have no control, it’s hard to feel like the makeshift comforts of our daily lives will do much for any of us when things decide to break bad.
Ratings
ROTTEN TOMATOES
81%
IMDB
