What if a super virus swept across the world, wiping out millions of people? Hollywood has played with this idea before, but the result is usually a zombie movie or an action flick where Dustin Hoffman darts across the country looking for a diseased monkey, both of which are equally unrealistic to me.
So kudos to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which tries to depict what would really happen if the world was struck by a killer virus. The movie does not necessarily tell a story in a traditional narrative sense - instead it throws in almost a dozen characters dealing with the virus in their own ways, which allows the audience to trace the growth of the MEV-1 virus and the ways it starts to rip society apart at the seams. And the cast that Soderbergh has gathered for these different perspectives is superb - look at this: Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Elliot Gould, Jude Law, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston, John Hawkes, Sanaa Lathan. It's quite a cast.
In some ways, this scattered narrative is the weakness in the film, preventing us from fully understanding the stories of some of the characters. For example, Marion Cotillard's storyline starts as perhaps the most interesting - she is sent to Hong Kong to find the origin of the virus - but then her story takes a strange turn. While I understand it from an intellectual level, I don't buy how it occurs in the movie. It just feels like she is missing one or two key scenes to make her character work. The same thing is true with Jude Law, who plays a blogger who rages about conspiracy theories and ends up contributing to the panic sweeping across the globe. I had trouble understanding the ins and outs of what he was doing; I just knew he was not a good guy (of course, they make sure we know he's not a good buy by giving Jude Law a weird prosthetic tooth. Only bad guys have weird teeth like that. Unfortunately, this makeup decision backfires. I probably missed important plot details because I couldn't pay attention to anything except that damn tooth!).
Then again, in some other ways, this fractured storyline is also a strength because it prevents the movie from falling into a Hollywood formula and keeps the whole crisis realistic and grounded. Presenting the story this way makes it clear that this could happen to us someday. The true horror of Contagion is seeing how easily this virus could spread, by shaking hands, by breathing on a casino chip for good luck, by simply holding onto a handrail on the bus. These small moments are given great importance in Contagion because they are the mundane actions that would kill us if a super virus really did strike. And that makes Contagion more scary than all the Saw movies combined.
I have to give the movie big props in one other way. All too often, science is portrayed as either nerdy or dangerous in movies. Contagion makes science cool. It's rare to see the government in a positive light in the film, it is even more rare to see the government scientists as the real heroes. I thought that was awesome and it was nice to see.
So all in all, Contagion is a solid film, not without some serious problems, but still a really good piece of work. It is well-written, superbly acted, and thought provoking. I feel with a little more work and a little less fake teeth, it could truly have been great.
BEST LINE:
Dr. Cheever: "We don't need to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."
MVP: SPOILER ALERT! The storyline that hit me the most was that of Dr. Erin Miers, played by Kate Winslet. Miers is sent to Minnesota, where the virus seems to have entered the United States. She has a tough job, tracking down the possible carriers, setting a triage for the inevitable deluge of infected, and all while dealing with a narrow-minded city council that doesn't want to stress out the town during the holidays. But Miers goes through with her work, carefully and efficiently. So imagine her surprise when she wakes up in the middle of the night, hacking and running a high fever. Here is an example of what should be most frightening to all of us: someone who did everything right, who should not have gotten sick, and yet she still got hit with the virus. And out of all of the characters in Contagion, it was Miers' fate that I was most concerned about. The question of whether Miers would live or die had me hooked for the whole movie. I give much of the credit to a low key, simple, but superb performance from Winslet. In a movie full of great actors, she stood out. So she wins the MVP!
