Steven Soderbergh's Contagion starts out as the kind of epic thriller that was Irwin Allen's specialty: a large-scale disaster unites a team of big movie stars who work together to fix it. It ends, however, with a sincere plea for order and patience in a world of chaos and mistrust. The movie tracks the global spread of a fatal disease, but at the outset a plague of cynicism has already taken its toll.
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
No comments:
Post a Comment