It's not the cough that carries you off...

Contagion
By Jonathan Fisher, November 9th, 2011

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a brilliant film that appeals to our deepest, darkest fears, imprinted into each of us by evolution. It envisages the worst-case scenario of a viral epidemic, on roughly the scale of the Spanish influenza of 1918 that killed 3% of the world's population, and infected 27%. 'Realism' is an adjective that has been bandied about in just about every review of Contagion. Realism is right. This is not a sensationalist fiction, like Outbreak, a fine and entertaining movie in its own right that played the scenario as a thriller. Instead of aiming to excite the viewer, Contagion wants us to merely consider. Consider, what would happen if every citizen in our overpopulated world saw every other citizen as a threat to their health? How would our technologically advanced society deal with nature at its most threatening? How would the psychological stress of a widespread outbreak take its toll on those we charge with protecting us in such instances? Contagion isn't a thriller. It's a Medical Scenario Presentation (a new genre?).


Steven Soderbergh is at his best when he applies his pared-back, no-unnecessary-frills style to these high-concept ideas. It's an irony that his art-house style works best on blockbuster ideas, but when he applies it to art-house flicks (The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble) he has a tendency to become pretentious and overbearing with his deliberation. There's no such pretension in Contagion, which focuses on a group of characters experiencing the outbreak of a bat/pig influenza strain with the potential to punch a very great hole in civilisation. There's Mitch (Matt Damon), an upper-middle class American who loses his unfaithful wife Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) to the virus. There's Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), two reps from the Centre for Disease Control who are trying to get a handle on the situation. There's also Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard), a WHO representative tracking the virus in Asia, and finally, Jude Law as a blogger who expounds conspiracy theories about "them" (the 1%?) profiting from fabricating a deadly supervirus.

About Jude Law. I think he's playing an Australian. He plays it with what is singularly the worst Australian accent I've ever heard. He also features an odd prosthetic front tooth. The strange attention to detail Soderbergh went to with this character makes me wonder if the wretched performance from Law was deliberate. No matter. His character's arc is fascinating. The internet may be one of the most extraordinary achievements of the human race, but Law's character represents the Internet's other side -- paranoia-inducing, ill-informed, rambling and moronic. Like David Icke, his business is spinning bullshit, and being charismatic and believable while doing so. Panic would reign supreme in a global epidemic without the Internet -- in today's world, people like Law's character would hasten the collapse of reason.

The film has just enough of insider-sounding language to come across as credible, and it certainly doesn't sensationalise the possibilities it lays before us. Dr. Cheever is a calculating, rational man, who understands that it isn't the cough that will carry us off -- it's the panic. This is a disease that will likely kill just 1% of the world's population. That's 70 million people. A lot of perished souls, and a massive natural disaster, to be sure. But that in itself shouldn't threaten our global civilisation. It would be the panic, the breakdown in law and order, the unimaginable fear of our fellow human being, that would destroy this bizarre and orderly society we have created for ourselves.

The scenes in which health officials attempt to track the origin of the virus and its progress are deeply fascinating. This is a puzzle movie as much as a Medical Scenario Presentation. Soderbergh's camera glides as slickly and as indifferently as the virus itself.

That is just what makes Contagion such an effective film: its indifference. The film isn't even concerned with the wall of immortality that usually surrounds the major characters in movies -- many characters die medias in res, well before their plot strands are tied up. It's not a conscious attempt to subvert, just a way of emphasising that our individual, human pursuits -- raising a family, tracking and preventing the spread of a virus -- engulf our entire beings and seem so important... and then we catch a cold and die.

Despite this indifference, Contagion is not a downer of a film. It allows itself to bask in a faint gleam of hope. Horrible things have, do, and will continue to happen to humanity, but we have an amazing tendency to bounce back. We live in a world where we almost feel we deserve convenience. Got a cold? Pop a pill. Want to go to the coast? Rent a car. Don't want to cook dinner? Order in.

It seems like when all this convenience collapses (as it inevitably will), we'll be at a complete loss. The reality is, though -- and Contagion knows this -- is that our expectations and perceptions of what happiness and well-being is will change. Life will go on.

Until it doesn't.


Contagion Trailer