Movie review: Contagion

by John P. Meyer

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Steven Soderbergh's nightmarish, chillingly matter-of-fact take on an all-too plausible "what if" tale.

The first thing to know about Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's paean to the benefits of hand sanitizer, is this:

Don't get too attached to any particular characters, because they're liable to drop dead on you just when you've started to like them.

Take Gwyneth Paltrow's character Beth Emhoff, for instance, who has her head sawed open on the morgue table before the first 15 minutes are up.

See, Beth is patient zero in the outbreak of a deadly disease that's sweeping the world and baffling medical experts by its virulence. The MEV-1 virus seems to have originated when a pig ate a piece of banana that got drooled on by a bat. (Or something like that.) And then the pig (or parts of him, anyway) got prepared as the main course in a Hong Kong dining establishment.

If I were a molecular biologist, I could go into clinical detail about how all this works, but of course I'm just a humble movie reviewer. (Feel free to consult your Centers for Disease Control — and Prevention! (CDC) for details.) The important thing is, Beth Emhoff's husband Mitch (Matt Damon) doesn't know she's just finished making extramarital airport layover whoopee with her old boyfriend in Chicago before flying home to Minnesota, and thus has planted a node of deadly virus in that heavily-populated bailiwick.

Scores of other characters come (and go!) over the course of this nightmarish, chillingly matter-of-fact telling of an all-too realistic "what if" tale, but none are more important to the eventual outcome of events than Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and his staff of CDC researchers. Erin Meers (Kate Winslet, who can emote through a surgical mask and vinyl face shield like no one else) takes on the thankless task of field researcher in the Emhoff's Minnesota home town, where MEV-1 spreads rapidly among the populace. Ally Hextall (the fabulously underrated Jennifer Ehle) and David Eisenberg (Demetri Martin, playing it disorientingly straight) head up efforts at the Atlanta lab headquarters, spending much of their time in negatively-pressurized suits behind the hermetically sealed doors of a CDC lab, doing their best to unlock the secrets of the virus.

In a parallel story line, World Health Organization (WHO) researcher Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) sets up shop in China, where she scores some Kowloon casino video files which could lead to the discovery of how the virus originally spread. What ends up happening to her is one of the more surprising elements of scripter Scott Z. Burns' gripping screenplay.

As might be expected in this social networking age, the operator of a conspiracy theory website rises to prominence on the basis of a claim that he's found a homeopathic cure for the disease. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is the blogger behind Truth Serum Now (dot com). Krumwiede's early take on the sudden wave of deaths in Hong Kong (as documented on cell phone videos) centers on the red herring theory that tainted fish must be involved — but never mind this early miscue, he eventually gets the right of it and then finds himself holding park bench assignations with pharmaceutical company reps.

Soderbergh's presentation style is frenetic and compelling, using graphical episode headers (DAY 2; DAY 18; etc.) to show us how events are increasingly spiraling out of control — as if humanity itself were racing counterclockwise around the toilet bowl of creation. Much of the narrative is told entirely through visuals, without dialog, as vignettes of the process of infection and the breakdown of social systems are documented to the accompaniment of Cliff Martinez's pulsating electronic score.

It will take an act of personal heroism — and a wild leap of faith — for the human race to have any chance at stabilizing its population and fending off a new dark age.

Could this sort of disastrous pandemic scenario actually happen? Don't ask me, I'm just a humble movie reviewer. But if it did, I'm pretty sure events would play out a lot like this.

My advice to the film's distributors: increase your profit margin by selling $2 Contagion-branded surgical masks to patrons leaving the theater.

"Here's a five, pal — and you can keep the change."

To find movie showtimes for Contagion, click here.

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