Contagion (2011)

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is billed as a medical thriller. Well, that’s half-right. This procedural medical film about the ultra-fast spread of an ultra-deadly disease, called MV-1, is about as thrilling as watching cells multiply.

It opens on a shot of Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), already looking queasy, sweaty and yellowish at an airport bar. As she chats on the phone to her unseen lover–not the one who put that shiny diamond ring on her finger–she dips her sickly hand into an open bowl of bar peanuts. After a business trip to Hong Kong, she’s in Chicago on a layover before heading home to Minnesota.

Beth’s circuitous route home guarantees maximum damage. In quick order, we watch a Chinese waiter, a Japanese businessman, an English fashion model, and Beth’s young son fall victim to the disease. Her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), is left with just half of his family to take care of as things get out of control. We’re talking marshal law and out-of-control looting.

Meanwhile, the CDC represented by Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishbourne) in Atlanta and field specialist Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) in Minnesota, the World Health Organization, under Dr. Leonora Orantes’s (Marion Cotillard) pretty, pant-suited direction, and the US Department of Homeland Security are mobilized to unravel and cure the mystery contagion. But they–including doctors played by Jennifer Ehle, Demetri Martin and Elliot Gould–must work faster than not only the disease but also a fear-mongering, snaggle-toothed blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law).

Contagion certainly sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it? Like some brilliant hybrid of 1995′s Outbreak and Soderbergh’s own Traffic, right? No such luck, friends. This dull, emotionless picture is like watching a documentary about the CDC: all orange biohazard suits and no drama. Written in cold, antiseptic style by Scott Z. Burns (who collaborated with both Soderbergh and Damon on The Informant!), Contagion is littered with red herrings, dropped narrative threads, and dead ends.

Let’s see, there’s Beth’s multinational employer, whose sinister-ness is implied but never explored. There’s Mitch’s inexplicable immunity to the pandemic, which is never studied to find a cure. Even conspiracy theorist Krumwiede is not focused on the right conspiracies. That the CDC is in bed with Big Pharma and not telling folks that there’s a natural homeopathic remedy is not conspiracy. It’s fact. All the thriller tropes are there, but the actual thrills never quite make it to the party.

Perhaps Burns and Soderbergh wanted to root Contagion in reality and show audiences how things might actually play out if some especially virulent disease entered our modern world. In a post-Katrina atmosphere of watching things fall apart, it’s an understandable aim. While I appreciate the filmmaker’s documentarian style, there’s something’s amiss when I can’t bring myself to give two hoots that 1% of the world’s population vanishes within three months. That’s what I call a flaw in the storytelling.

The all-star cast and global scope formula worked for Soderbergh in Traffic but fails him here. The size of the cast–all fine actors, each given about 11 minutes of screen time to prove it–is one of Contagion’s biggest problems. The fact that the majority of them play doctors, who seem mostly insulated from the disease may be why. That birds-eye, procedural approach may work on freak-of-the-week episodic television. But this isn’t an episode of House, although with a cast like this, I half-expect to see Robert Sean Leonard in some un-credited background role. Sure, there’s a nod to each of the doc’s vulnerabilities, but then the camera must flit along to the next plotline somewhere in Cairo or Djibouti or wherever.

When I initially saw the trailer for Contagion, my first thought was: again? From the previously mentioned Outbreak to Stephen King’s The Stand to the A&E mini-series The Andromeda Strain and even the new Torchwood: Miracle Day, this is territory that has been mined time and again. In all of those, audiences are forced to examine themselves and the world they condone and consent to live in. With this film, there are no good guys or bad guys. Nobody did it. Nobody is to blame. And consequently, nobody cares.