Contagion: First-Rate Thriller

At one point during Contagion, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), a doctor from the Centers for Disease Control, relays to staff members at the Minnesota Department of Health that the average human being touches his or her face 3 – 5 times every waking minute.  It sounded absurd to me at first, until I started consciously thinking about my hand movements and realized that, similar to a teenager and the word "like," touching my face was an automatic, eerily frequent gesture.  Dr. Mears says that we are touching doorknobs, water fountains, other people and countless other things that transmit microscopic organisms as easily as a 10 cent hooker.  If our immune systems encountered organisms for which they had no defense, then all that touchy-feely behavior could lead to real trouble real fast.  That inherent horror, the idea that our highly evolved civilization is so frighteningly fragile, is explored to great effect in Contagion.

Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a business trip to Hong Kong to her loving family in Minnesota.  She's under the weather, but her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), doesn't think much of it until she's hospitalized after a violent seizure and dies suddenly not long after.  Soon there are similar cases being reported in Hong Kong.  Then in London.  Then in many other of the world's major urban areas.  72 hours after Beth's untimely death, schools are being closed, quarantines are set up, the possible infected are being kept in isolation.  The death toll rises into the hundreds, the infected into the thousands. 

As the world panics, Dr. Leonara Orantes (Marion Cotillard) of the World Health Organization attempts to find the genesis of the virus.  Was Beth Emhoff patient zero?  Where did she contract the virus?  Before leaving Hong Kong, she spent considerable time in a casino.  Can you fathom the number of people she probably encountered there?  Meanwhile, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) of the CDC futilely struggle to find a treatment – any treatment.  They are unable to grow the virus and if they can't grow the virus, they can't develop a vaccination. 

The void of information is filled for the masses by the paranoia of Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a blogger with a penchant for conspiracy theories.  The CDC, he claims, is withholding the vaccine until they can profit from it.  All you need is forsythia.  It cured him.  Or perhaps he, like Mitch, was immune the whole time.  But why should he care?  He's profiting from the worldwide panic just as much as anyone while innocents like Mitch live under constant threats of looting, riots and home invasion, crossing the days off the calendar as the world collapses around them. 

In Contagion, the word "collapse" entails many things.  Part of the brilliance of Scott Z. Burns' script is his ability to show how a global pandemic effects different corners of the earth in specific ways.  Anchoring the story is the tale of the suburban everyman in Mitch, grappling with not only a personal loss, but struggling to protect the sole source of comfort he has left in his daughter.  Bearing the burden of the world's wrath is Dr. Cheevers and Dr. Hextall, who have to balance the personal  responsibilities they have to their families with the professional responsibilities they have to find a vaccine.  With Dr. Mears, the implications of what it means to dedicate oneself to a profession hits too close to home.  The significance and stakes of each story is always apparent despite the all-star ensemble cast and the global scale, which is a testament to the tightness of Burns' script and Soderbergh's efficient directing, which fluidly moves the narrative along with concise editing and a thumping, ominous electronic score.

Thinking more about it, the word "contagion" implies more than one meaning as well.  For the first half of the film, the characters struggle to keep up with a virus that infects, kills, then mutates.  They need to react quickly to the questions: what do you know about it?  When will there be a cure?  When can I get it?  For the second half of the film, the virus becomes the "truths" circulating about the virus, which infect just as deeply and spread just as easily.  Krumwiede frequently references the millions of unique visitors to his blog, hovering it over the heads of central characters as both a boast and a threat.  The lingering question remains, by the end of the film, unanswered: what is more dangerous – the disease or the information? 

Unfortunately, despite being an effective and taut thriller, Contagion is nothing more than an effective and taut thriller.  Dangers of social media aside, Contagion is nothing we haven't seen before.  In the days of remakes and adaptations, there's certainly something to be said about an original script that is executed exceptionally with this casting caliber, but if Contagion is remembered at the end of the year as one of the best, then it'll be largely due to the skill of the filmmakers as opposed to the film's aspirations.