Contagion 4K

The last time we reviewed this movie as a Blu-ray, it could be called speculative fiction. In the interim, the premise of Steven Soderberg’s Contagion played out in real life. We’ve seen the world turned upside down and shaken by a pandemic that’s killed an estimated 3.4 million people worldwide. The most shocking thing is how poorly the United States reacted to the ordeal, accounting for almost a third of reported fatalities. The nation’s dereliction of its shared social responsibility came straight from the top. The emergency was denied, minimized, spun for political leverage and dismissed with jokes, even as hundreds of thousands perished. Half the country rejected vital health guidelines as a ‘liberal conspiracy’ and an affront to conservative values.

Eight years ago we reviewed Contagion while researching the apocalyptic fantasy The Satan Bug. We took Soderbergh’s thriller as science fiction about a plausible biological threat. It was obviously much more than that. Its prophecies were certainly more accurate than other science fiction pictures peeking into the near future. while championing the crucial work of the doctors and scientists of our sophisticated health emergency apparatus, Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay gave us a preview of the way our media and public information system has been compromised, crippled and hijacked by an open-source model that encourages the spread of disinformation. Even if good leadership is in position, the communication of information of critical importance can be shut out and shouted down.

Contagion hits closer to home than most horror pictures. Our pandemic wasn’t as dramatic or as lethal, but we fully believe in its possibilities. The film’s first wave of casualites fells a young mother and her adorable young son. A Hong Kong woman’s boyfriend suddenly succumbs, but she is slain even faster, just a day or two later. The disease spreads like one of those monster movies in which the deadly menace grows exponentially, as defined by Susan Sontag in her The Imagination of Disaster essay. Previously, ‘threatening the whole world at once’ was subject matter for comic books. Movies about plagues and diseases haven’t had much of a record for plausibility. The bad example we always cite is Outbreak (1995), where a vaccine for a deadly virus gets victims up on their feet in no time at all, their damaged organs suddenly restored to good health.

Contagion’s sci-fi monster is MEV-1, a virus that kills just a day or so after first contact. Scott Z. Burns juggles the film’s six star characters, maintaining high viewer interest throughout. We’re off-guard from the very beginning, when a big star doesn’t even make it through the first reel before being dissected on an autopsy slab.

Global overpopulation presents new public health problems on a daily basis. Contagion reminds us that people now zip across the globe the way they once visited the next town. A freak virus mutation in Hong Kong is on three continents ten hours after first contact, and two days later the U.S. government, the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are struggling to get a handle on it. Married executive Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is seriously ill soon after deplaning from Hong Kong; she has no way of knowing that she’s already handed off a death sentence to several people: the colleague who picked her up from the airport, her lover-on-the-side, an elementary school nurse — and her own son.

As the virus spreads, CDC agent Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is dispatched to Minnesota to trace the source of the infection, and meets resistance from local officials. Coordinating research efforts in Atlanta is CDC director Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne). In San Francisco, independent analyst Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) defies an order to burn his samples and pushes forth to isolate the virus. The head Atlanta researcher Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) must get a vaccine program going as soon as possible.  →  Meanwhile, much of the world literally comes to halt, with uninfected people going to extremes to isolate themselves — if they can.

Exacerbating the disaster is a flood of disinformation on the Internet. Opportunists clog the media with alarmist conspiracy theories and lies. Would-be journalist Alan Krumweide (Jude Law) convinces millions that the CDC is actively suppressing a cure, which he identifies as an herb called Forsythia. Krumweide negotiates with a hedge fund manager to monetize his ‘special’ information. Meanwhile the CDC suffers an inside crisis: trying to protect his wife, its director inadvertently leaks privileged information and causes a mass panic in Chicago.

←  Dispatched to Hong Kong, World Health Organization worker Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotilliard) is taken prisoner by a colleague whose small Chinese village has been hit by the virus. Knowing full well that the hamlet will have no priority for the coming vaccine, he ransoms Dr. Orantes to get first access. The worldwide death toll has already reached thirty million when Dr. Hextall isolates a potentially viable vaccine in Atlanta. She decides to save time by testing it on herself. If she’s lucky, she might prevent millions of additional deaths.

Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns’ fast-moving, absolutely riveting narrative communicates its points with clarity and precision. At first Contagion feels like a public service message gone insane — shots linger on smudges on doors to show ways that the germs are being transmitted. When we first see Beth Emhoff, she is already falling sick. Normal contact with other people seals their deaths as if she were made of poison. The virus hits everywhere — the wealthy aren’t immune, and upscale neighborhoods are hit just as hard as the slums. Beautiful women, young adults and cute kids die horrible deaths.

Contagion is grim and scary, but it has no scenes of gratuitous shock. The one graphic moment, the sight of a woman’s scalp being folded over her face during an autopsy, reminds us of our mortality, that the healthiest of us is still made of vulnerable skin and bone. We don’t see what they see inside her skull, but it is implied that most of her brain has been consumed. It’s the kind of detail viewers don’t forget.

MEV-1 is more virulent than most bio threats, but beyond that creative license Contagion exaggerates nothing. Soderbergh’s characters react like humans, not sci-fi heroes. The sudden widower Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) is initially so shocked that he mentally rejects reality. But he doesn’t burst out in tears and histrionics. Critics complaining that Damon’s reaction is too subdued don’t know what they’re talking about. Emhoff’s heroism comes when he finds the stamina to soldier on through the trials ahead, with his family reduced to one teenage daughter. His unglamorous task is to quarantine her from outside contact, even the boy next door. That’s the most prophetic part of the movie: for the last four years, much of the world’s population has been trying to weather the storm.

Soderbergh’s convincing worldwide catastrophe does not play the lets-be-spectacular game of escapist disaster films. Hints of large-scale unrest suffice to convey the extent of the social breakdown: a riot at a food distribution held by the army, the looting of a pharmacy. The notion that America is immune to uncivilized behavior died years ago in gas shortage panics, race riots and anti-government insurrections. Soderbergh need only show the edge of chaos to make us believe that Damon’s survivor is better off hunkered down in his house, and on the defensive.

But neither does Contagion predict a cynical apocalypse. There is crime, but no roaming gangs of cannibals. Mitch Emhoff’s neighborhood doesn’t even lose electrical power. Being connected to cable news brings needed information, even if the Internet breeds alarmist-opportunist like Alan Krumweide. The trash isn’t being picked up, but the center does hold. In truth, the movie doesn’t show a full spectrum of reactions — we only see what’s happening in Mitch’s fairly affluent neighborhood. Have poorer sections of the city been abandoned to crime and arson?  The disruption of the Covid outbreak in the Summer of 2020 triggered widespread looting and lawlessness.

Contagion avoids hyped dramatics. No gunfights break out, and no hero earns his stripes by rescuing a busload of children.

Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns offer subplots that predict our lives from 2020-2024. Quarantine forces Mitch Emhoff’s daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron)  must attend school via Remote Learning, missing experiences that millions of high school and college kids would later miss. The film shows sensitivity to its minor characters. A big & friendly Minnesotan CDC aide clearly has a crush on Kate Winslet’s Doctor Mears. She has no time for any such diversion, even if she found the aide attractive.  ↑  Any other thriller would tap the aide for comedy relief, for easy jokes. The movie instead affords him dignity and respect.

“She made her mistakes, but she loved you.”

Another human relationship handled without cynicism is an extramarital affair uncovered by Dr. Mears’ investigation. It was once the norm for movies to make ‘fate’ punish immoral behavior. The noxious, brainless The Towering Inferno traps a pair of illicit lovers in a burning skyscraper. The implication is that their horrible deaths are a deserved punishment. Contagion plays no such games. The deaths caused by MEV-1 are a crazy lottery of chance, of random bad luck, or of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As in the real world, some deplorable behavior isn’t punished, while some honest mistakes are. Jude Law’s Alan Krumweide puts his personal importance ahead of all other considerations, but he also seems to believe in what he’s doing. The security agents that can’t suppress him are the same watchdogs charged with the responsibility of punishing Laurence Fishburne’s Dr. Cheever. We understand Cheever’s actions, and we applaud his personal method of atonement. Dr. Orantes is an actual kidnap victim, but will anybody want to mete out punishment for the crime?  What does personal revenge have to do anything, after she’s been living with the children in the Chinese village?

In the end Contagion still delivers the disaster scenario identified by Susan Sontag. It also brings a positive message about science and medicine. When not obstructed by mindless hate and ignorance, our bio medics achieve bona fide miracles. One of the film’s nicest images shows Jennifer Ehle’s Dr. Hextall working in a clean room with her new vaccines. She’s wearing a bulky, unflattering red & white plastic suit, inflated with clean air to breathe. Dr. Hextall is in a good place. She is doing GOOD, and that is its own reward. Science is not evil, and higher learning and academic excellence are not anti-American.