Contagion

 

3 Stars

Director Steven Soderbergh knows how to keep calm in the face of a global pandemic.

He's the anti-Michael Bay, the un-Roland Emmerich. No fake-documentary "realism" here; Soderbergh values the silence before the storm, or a hushed two-person encounter in which one or both parties are concealing something.

Written by Scott Z. Burns, "Contagion" -- likely to provoke a widespread outbreak of midscreening antibacterial hand gel usage -- contains little in the way of on-screen mass panic beyond a drugstore looting sequence.

Shot all over the world with major stars, yet more like an independent project in its vibe, "Contagion" imagines the speed, breadth and elusive riddle of a virus that causes flulike symptoms, followed by seizure and brain hemorrhage and then, as we see in a single, chillingly offhanded middle-distance shot, mass graves.

"Contagion" doesn't hype its own terrifyingly high stakes or body count, even as the body count heads into the millions. The result is not quite medicine and not quite cotton candy. But it works. It's made for grown-ups. After this summer's onslaught of highly variable superhero fodder, "Contagion" arrives as a welcome antidote.

It begins with a title card announcing Day 2 of the problem. The first thing heard on the soundtrack is a cough. Someone is sick. A Minneapolis businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) reroutes her trip back from Hong Kong through Chicago where, we learn in an airport phone call, she has rekindled an affair with an old boyfriend before returning home to her husband (Matt Damon) and their two kids. Her death comes very early in "Contagion."

A Tokyo bus passenger suffers a similar seizure. Captured on cellphone video, the incident goes viral, though not as fast as the virus itself. The video feeds the outrage and Web traffic of a San Francisco blogger (a twitchy Jude Law) who flogs various conspiracy theories regarding the pandemic.

The sudden loss suffered by Damon's character provides the emotional access point in a deliberately distanced picture. The script makes dominant, clearheaded but human-scaled heroes and heroines out of representatives of the World Health Organization (Marion Cotillard plays an epidemiologist scrambling to re-create the Paltrow character's last hours) and the Centers for Disease Control (Kate Winslet's Dr. Mears risks her life with the other first responders, while her superior, played by Laurence Fishburne, considers how much information to release, and when).

Burns' script is very sly about loading up just enough information regarding the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic (50 million dead) and such without sending the average moviegoer brain into tune-out mode. Soderbergh zips around from Geneva to rural China to Minneapolis and Chicago and other cities while the major characters struggle to keep the losses from mounting.

"Contagion's" implacable tone has its drawbacks. The movie is almost pathological in its avoidance of messy emotion. In the 105-minute final edit, some of the storylines, particularly the one anchored by Cotillard, fail to fully activate. And while one can see why the story focuses increasingly on the relationship between Damon and his teenage daughter (the honest and unaffected Anna Jacoby-Heron) in the later stages, I'm not sure Soderbergh and Burns believe in their own sentiment.

Yet on some level "Contagion" probably needs it, lest it dry out to the point of aridity. Throughout, Soderbergh reasserts his assurance in the ways and rhythms of the multitrack narrative as well as the aesthetic payoff of the unexpected visual choice. His compositions demand our attention not because they're kinetic. Quite the opposite: Their stillness belies the nature of the pandemic. It's as if the characters are stuck in their own brand of interior dread, thinking as fast as they can but often helplessly, like deer caught in a limitless number of viral headlights.

 

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"Contagion" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for disturbing content and some language).

Running time: 1:45.

Cast: Marion Cotillard (Dr. Orantes); Matt Damon (Mitch); Gwyneth Paltrow (Beth); Laurence Fishburne (Dr. Cheever); Kate Winslet (Dr. Mears); Jude Law (Alan); Jennifer Ehle (Dr. Hextall); Demetri Martin (Dr. Eisenberg); Bryan Cranston (Haggerty); John Hawkes (Roger).

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Scott Z. Burns; produced by Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher and Gregory Jacobs. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

 

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