Contagion (2011) Warner Bros. Pictures, Participant Media, Imagenation
With an all-star cast and people like writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Informant!), one would expect director Steven Soderbergh (Sex,Lies, and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, Traffic) to knock one out of the park with his latest fare Contagion, a film about the ease at which pandemics can spread in an age when international travel is within the reach of millions.
The problem with Contagion though isn’t with an unknown superbug, it’s more that it’s a lumbering hulk of a movie that would have played much better as a public service announcement about what people should be doing in their everyday lives as a matter of basic hygiene—covering your mouth when sneezing, washing hands often, etc…
Despite its popularity with many critics and its tagline: “Nothing spreads like fear,” (which is probably what’s compelling audiences to see it) Contagion comes off as fresh only to those who’ve never heard of the History Channel and the numerous times this plot has been featured ad nauseam on shows about natural disasters and hypothetical pandemics.
And even though Contagion is packed with a literal who’s who of stars—Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet—it makes very little use of the talent on hand and delivers even less in the form of character development.
Beth Emhoff (Paltrow) succumbs first to the virus after having travelled to Asia but not before stopping off in Chicago for a quickie with an ex-boyfriend who also gets sick and ends up dying.
Poetic justice? Maybe.
In a bid to keep his sanity (while society unravels and after losing his wife and son to the virus), Mitch Emhoff (Damon) alternates between standing on line for MREs (meals ready to eat) and peeling his daughter’s (Anna Jacoby-Heron) horny boyfriend off of her all while planning his great escape to Wisconsin of all places.
Meanwhile, a stone-faced Dr. Ellis Cheever (Fishburne) icily admits “we have a virus with no treatment protocol, and no vaccine at this time” but is more preoccupied with evacuating his healthy wife Aubrey (Sanaa Lathan) than he is with his top field investigator, Dr. Erin Mears (Winslet) who after contracting the virus is unceremoniously buried outside a hockey arena in a mass grave.
On the other side of the planet, World Health Organization official, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Cotillard) is surreptitiously held hostage by Asian villagers while mega-blogger Alan Krumwiede (Law) sips forsythia tea and wanders around London wearing a jerry-rigged hazmat helmet that looks as if it were made from the plastic covering found on some sofas.
This is the kind of film that makes me wish I owned stock in a hand sanitizer company.
Still, Contagion manages to cough up (insert laugh track here) a couple of fine performances mainly from Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould, yes that Elliott Gould from MASH) who reminds Krumwiede that “Blogging is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation” and Sanjay Gupta who plays himself.—Steve Santiago
4th Dimension Films 