Consider how many surfaces you touch in a given day. How many hands you shake, or the contact you make incidentally with others. Imagine who has touched those surfaces, what those hands have picked up, and where that stranger might have been. Or even a family member. Think about where your money comes from. Your food. Your water. Consider the millions of microscopic germs you’re exposed to on a daily basis. Then know that such exposure can kill you.
In Steven Soderbergh’s plausible outbreak movie Contagion, intense mysophobia surfaces and spreads in the swath of an unseen, deadly virus. Countless people are stricken and suffer as the sickness mutates and expands across the globe, while the human race is powerless to stop it. There are no nuclear bombs, zombies, aliens, killer robots, or other violent ends in this apocalypse. It’s a doomsday scenario that starts with a handshake.
On a business trip in Hong Kong, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracts a new, incurable strain that she unknowingly passes to anyone unlucky enough to share her space. At home in Minneapolis, her health steeply declines until Emhoff, later dubbed Patient Zero, is suddenly, inexplicably dead. The first casualty in what will become a catastrophic pandemic.
Lesson learned: avoid Gwyneth Paltrow. However, when the aftermath begins to spread to an expanded web of characters from all walks of life, the impact is evident. Beth’s husband Mitch (Matt Damon) shelves his grief to protect his remaining family. An underused Kate Winslet plays Dr. Erin Mears, a frustrated medical investigator attempting to make sense of the confusion, guided by stoic Center for Disease Control executive Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne). Jude Law represents the sleazy face of fear-based journalism, in this case as a snaggle-toothed blogger disseminating his own dangerous swine flu of misinformation, terror, and distrust. As a representative from the World Health Organization, Marion Cotillard appears and is promptly forgotten, a feat considering her striking beauty. Others, including a janitorial John Hawkes and a sober Bryan Cranston, make appearances, but the stand-out is Jennifer Ehle as the humble scientist searching for a vaccine.
At one point, Dr. Mears tells a room full of skeptics, glancing at the audience too, that we touch our faces 2,000 to 3,000 times a day, contributing to the spread of infection, before she delivers an impromptu lecture on the mathematical figure R-not and the definition of harmful “fomites.” The explanations are part of Soderbergh’s calm, practical approach to the concept, concerned more with the realism of the outbreak and what life would be like in the stages of a deathly-serious outbreak. The various characters simply spring up from the progression. But empathy is often lost in the shuffle as the situation spreads, until only the shocking imagery lingers. The ghastly, dead-eyed expression of a young victim. Abandoned homes rimmed by neglected garbage. Mass graves lined with the diseased and deceased.
But Soderbergh doesn’t stop there. Structurally, he loads the 105 minutes with creative cuts to eerie close-ups of fomites or devastating “B-roll,” so there is always something (or someone) new to witness, if only briefly. Ultimately, it provides a sterile mosaic of the possible escalation, from paranoia to panic to anarchy, through a variety of perspectives where reactions seem repressed, almost statistical, and the pieces don’t quite coalesce. Perhaps it’s because many of the heartfelt goodbyes are said while wearing surgical masks or Hazmat suits. There is an eventual release of maudlin affectations, but they gush and dissipate as if from an opened valve.
The practical execution is distancing, but Contagion‘s inexorable concept will wriggle into your mind. Maybe you leave the theater numbed by the experience. But soon you’ll give a sideways glance to a person coughing without covering their mouth. Then you’ll avoid door handles with disgust or hesitate before handshakes. Before you know it you are backing into doors with your arms out like you’re entering an OR. Wash your hands and watch your symptoms. Contagion will creep up on you.
3.5 out of 5.
Pingback: ‘The Lion King’ Reclaims Box Office Crown 17 Years Later « Cinema