Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion begins with a cough in the dark — something mundane, and ordinary, if irritating and unhealthy, that soon grows into something else: an explosion of fear, death and hysteria. As the movie proper begins, a title soon informs us that it‘s Day Two of the epidemic, or pandemic. Whatever happened on Day One? Eventually — but not for a while — they’ll tell us.
Horror movies often deal with the supernatural, the irrational, something menacing that can’t be explained — or can be explained, but just as another horror movie cliché. Contagion, a truly scary movie from director Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum and Soderbergh‘s The Informant!) is about a threat that seems far more real and of the moment: a pandemic erupting out of a new virus called MEV-1 that apparently starts in Hong Kong with the first known victim or Patient Zero (Gwyneth Paltrow), spreads quickly to Minneapolis, Tokyo, San Francisco and much of the rest of the world, and before long, has claimed millions of victims and reduced the U.S. to chaos — while plunging medical agencies (from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the World Health Organization, to the Epidemic Intelligence Service) into a desperate hunt for something, anything, that will stem the tide.
Movies about epidemics, from Panic in the Streets to Outbreak, usually focus on one strong character battling, and usually winning, against the malignant sickness. Contagion, instead, gives us a kaleidoscopic look at a number of people, doctors, media, government figures, or ordinary citizens, fighting against a plague that seems unbeatable, that comes out of nowhere (or a room in Hong Kong) and kills its victims within days. What can stop it? Quarantine? Vaccines? Flight? Homeopathic cure-alls peddled by Internet charlatans? A race to the border?
Soderbergh and Burns throw out the options, and then leave their characters swimming in a rising sea of social collapse. Contagion, a bit like Soderbergh’s drug trade ensemble picture, Traffic (based on the lesser seen but excellent British miniseries Traffik, by Alistair Reid and writer Simon Moore), doesn’t try to peddle conventional movie heroism, though some of the characters are certainly heroic. Instead, it tries to convince us that what we’re seeing could really happen.
How did it happen? More troubling, could it happen in real life? It has before, of course. There have been plagues and epidemics throughout history, from the spread of AIDS (with its 25 million victims to date), to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 (which claimed 50 million lives), to the numerous epidemics of smallpox, cholera and syphilis, all the way back to the Black Death, which, peaking in 1348-1350, killed 75 to 100 million people and wiped out much of Europe. We tend to ignore figures like this — maybe because they’re so appalling, that they’re hard to process or even imagine — but Contagion brings them home, by showing what it might be like to live and suffer and fight through a modern version of those plagues, raging though our increased world population with all the increased opportunities for contact and infection.
The most horrifying element of Contagion, in fact, is how plausible Soderbergh, Burns and company make it all seem, as the movie races from city to city, scene to scene, character to character. The ensemble here is a large and varied gallery drawn from a largely all star cast that includes Paltrow as Beth Emhoff (Patient Zero from Minneapolis), Matt Damon as Beth’s immune husband Mitch, and Jude Law as an opportunistic San Francisco blogger named Alan Krumweide, plus a medical corps that includes Laurence Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever of the CDC, Kate Winslet as his troubleshooter Erin Mears, Jennifer Ehle as vaccine-creator Ally Hexel, Elliott Gould as medical brain Ian Sussman, Marion Cotillard as another plague-battler Dr. Leonora Orantes.
None of these characters is drawn very deeply, but they’re memorable because of the star quality of the actors playing them, because of the pungency of their scenes, and the gravity of the medical disaster into which the movie throws them. Damon gives the story some narrative glue, because we’re so used to his impersonations of common men in weird circumstances, Winslet wrenches your heartstrings once again and Fishburne gives Cheevers lots of stature in minimal screen time.
The performance already anointed by many critics of the movie — and I think they’re right — is Dr. Hexel by Jennifer Ehle (who played Elizabeth to Colin Firth‘s Darcy in the BBC-TV adaptation of Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice, and recently popped up as Geoffrey Bush’s wife, in Firth’s Oscar-winner The King’s Speech), and she’s certainly due. But it is an ensemble picture, which depends on strength from everyone, which includes fine performances by Demetri Martin, Bryan Cranston, Armin Rohde, John Hawkes and nearly a dozen others. Soderbergh has always been good at handling big casts, in the Oceans thrillers as well as Traffic, and here, he’s able to give everyone a shining moment or two, even if, in the story, they’re mostly flailing around in darkness.
He’s also good at creating the impression of a multi-track events on multiple strands. As the story keeps building, moving inexorably to that all-important flashback to Day One, the tension keeps building too. The movie works on our nerves, our sense of dreadful possibility. Yes, this could happen, we tend to feel. The world might fall apart just like this, And, throughout the picture, Soderbergh and his crew (cinematographer Soderbergh, editor Stephen Mirrione, production designer Howard Cummings, composer Cliff Martinez and the others — keep cranking up the pace, piling on the chaos, showing us streets littered with the detritus of mass plague and death, hospitals overtaxed, and at one point, the skin seemingly peeled back from one Hollywood star’s skull. Horror? This time, yes.
Watching Contagion, I kept thinking inescapably of something closer to home: how badly some people are treated in hospitals these days, especially older people. As I’ve said A hospital administrator sadly informed me, after I told him some horror stories about my mother’s questionable medical treatment before her death, that there was an unspoken policy in some hospitals to give second or third rate care to the elderly, because taking care of them wasn’t seen as cost-effective or sufficiently lucrative. Well, why not make a horror movie out of that?
Soderbergh could do it, I guess. He’s dealt with sickness and drugs and, in a way, health matters before, especially in Erin Brockovich, but also in films like Solaris, Gray’s Anatomy, Traffic and Night Watch (which he wrote). Even a noir remake like The Underneath (which Soderbergh derived from Robert Siodmak’s and Daniel Fuchs’ Criss Cross) has a hospital scene. And then, of course, there’s the movie that made Soderbergh’s career: 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, whose main character, James Spader as Graham, seems to be living in a sex-free, germ-free bubble, observing sex on video, rather than experiencing it.
All that suggests that Soderbergh does have something of a germ or sickness fetish or mild obsession — nothing like Howard Hughes’ of course — and that this new movie might be even more horrifying to him than it is to us. Frankly, much as I like Contagion, I find it scarier to hear that Soderbergh is thinking of retiring to become a painter. Why choose though? If Winston Churchill and Henry Fonda could find time to paint, why not the cinematically prolific Soderbergh?
Here, anyway, is a different, more disturbing, shockingly plausible film horror than we usually get. Contagion, in fact, is the kind of intelligent, well-worked-out, reality based thriller of which we don’t get enough, but which we’d suspect from this filmmaker. Let’s hope, if Soderbergh takes a break, he makes it a hiatus and not a career-change. And let’s hope we never have to face in real life what Soderbergh and Burns imagine here: the ultimate health care nightmare.