CONTAGION

Contagion (2011)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Scott Z. Burns
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet

R-Not? R-So!

Contagion begins with Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), off on business travel in Hong Kong and set to return to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and their son and daughter. She's also bringing back with her a billion new pals; a virus infection that begins with an onset of flu like symptoms.

The title of the film should tell you where this is going pretty easily. Beth travel across the globe towards home, infecting an unknown number of people along the way. Contagion does a good job of showing just how casually people touch common items and thus convey lots of microscopic critters. Handrails on stairs and escalators, elevator buttons, shaking hands, phones, the peanuts in a bowl at a bar; the list of ways in which we allow tiny hobos to hop the trains of humanity is near infinite.

The new disease shows itself to have a pretty effective mortality rate rather early on, and is also extremely contagious. Remember the horror stories of how bad the Swine Flu might become? This actually is that horror story. It stops far short of being apocalyptic - Contagion does not even approach the devastation of something like The Stand - however, it does send the entire globe into turmoil as the disease catches fire and people begin to rapidly die.

Contagion keeps itself as grounded in reality as it can. The film doesn't approach its presentation of a world torn by disease by any means sensationalist; rather, it is an attempt at showing what "could" happen if modern man were struck by a new and powerful virus of a sort not previously encountered.

The film handles this by trailing multiple sub-story character threads, each either directly or merely semi-directly related to the others. Each character is caught in a varied set of chaotic and often nightmarish circumstances as they struggle to survive a disease that the top minds of the world do not understand. Often followed characters are CDC directory Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), who attempts to establish a high level strategy for combating the spread of the disease; Mitch Emhoff, who is determined to shield what remains of his family from contracting the deadly disease - and the rise of ruthless thugs - as best as he can; Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), sent to work the front lines of the viral battle by Dr. Cheever, risking being infected herself; Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), who attempts to discover just where first known victim Beth Emhoff originally contracted the disease by tracing her path through Hong Kong; Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a freelance journalist and conspiracy theorist blogger who is undergoes a personal mission to uncover what he feels is the hidden truth behind it all.

The disease achieves an exceedingly high mortality rate at about 25-30%, and is also initially described as having an R0 (pronounced "R-Not", this value is used to show how contagious a virus may be) of 2. This may seem like it's not very high - however, it is an exponent of the infected population. With a value of two, just a single pair of infected individuals will likely bring the total infected population to 4 in one iteration, then those 4 to 16, then to 256, then to 65536, and then to a much larger number. While the film isn't presenting a viral threat that would literally kill everyone, it is talking about a bug that could kill a quarter of global humanity or more, and may do it quickly.

The primary focus of Contagion is the cultural reaction to this deadly disease. Life in the United States rapidly falls into complete chaos. Commerce and industry completely stop. Law enforcement disappears to a skeletal force, and life in the city becomes a deadly venture wherein groups of armed thugs roam, loot, and worse. Trash pickup - something we rarely think about and take for granted - stops, and the sidewalks of the cities literally bulge with mountains of refuse. Civilization is in a state of rampant chaos.

Contagion manages to be an effective film in many ways, and this is often accomplished by not pulling its punches or being shy about the effects of exposure to deadly disease. There's an unspoken Hollywood taboo about the showing the death of children; yet Contagion presents the dead face of very young boy, his mouth covered with the foam of drying bile vomited during his final seizures, and by doing this hammers in the point that disease does not discriminate and may yet come for us all.

Perhaps the most chilling scene lies within a scene with father Mitch Emhoff, who's locked up what remains of his family in their suburban home, in hopes they may wait out the disease. It's nighttime, and the power is out; Mitch is alerted to a commotion outside and peers out his second story window. In the dusky light, he sees and hears cracks of gunfire flash from his neighbor's windows. Has someone been shot? Killed? A pair of masked men dressed in black and armed with shotguns burst through the home's backdoor, and they run out of view, leaping over the small neighborly picket fence.

It's a great moment, and this greatness is derived from its quiet restraint. Mitch doesn't know where these two thugs are going with their shotguns. He calls 911 but the chaos of the disease has suspended the service. There's nothing he can do if those two men decide to break in - he's a common man and never thought to own a gun himself. The powerlessness of the moment is brilliantly laid out in this non-sensationalist slice of organic reality that conveys just how vulnerable the man is feeling about himself and the family he is trying to protect.

My biggest complaint about Contagion is that it does portray Alan Krumwiede, an outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry, as a bit of a whacko. This portrayal seems to tacitly imply that the pharmaceutical industry is A-OK; I mean, if the only people complaining are crazies, then the target must not be so bad, right? Not so fast. Loonies like conspiracy theorist Krumwiede unfortunately do exist; however, there is a lot of rather real evidence that the pharmaceutical industry is primarily about money and not so very much about health, and I feel that Contagion could have been a little more solid by portraying this very real perception of the industry in a fairer light.

This is a minor quibble, and it's really about the only quibbling I can do about Contagion. By effect of its design, you never really get very close to its characters - the film is less about the people and more about the impact of the disease on culture and society. It's a good cautionary tale that takes the unusual step of keeping its horrific story within the realm of reality. What I learned from this film was 1.) stop touching everything and 2.) buy a gun.

Last point - for extra fun, see this in a crowded theater and bust out a couple of good sneezes about halfway through the film (this suggestion brought to you by Cobane of the Outpost).