Steven Soderbergh (2011)

Contagion is being described, and widely praised, as a modern, thinking person’s disaster movie.  Its differences from the 1970s model are much greater than its similarities.  In the pictures of forty years ago, the big names in the cast entered the arena one by one, each with her or his backstory.  The audience was meant to wonder who would be killed off and who would survive in the course of the next two hours but was required to wait for the cast to settle into position and the horror that imperilled them all to emerge.  In Contagion, there’s a nasty cough on the soundtrack before any images appear; when they do, we see that the cough belongs to one of the stars, Gwyneth Paltrow, and she’s dead within a few screen minutes.  The lethal virus that kills her is, within a few more minutes, threatening the survival of civilisation, of humanity itself.  In Che, Steven Soderbergh recreated Che Guevara’s campaigns with (as far as I could tell) painstaking skill and application.  Working from a screenplay by Scott Z Burns, he does here for a global viral pandemic what he did in Che for guerrilla warfare.  With the help of his production designer Howard Cummings, Soderbergh creates some convincing scenes of urban breakdown and decay (the director is again his own DoP, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews).   The film describes medical and government responses to the spread of the virus in considerable and persuasive technical detail.  Contagion is less than half the aggregate length of the two Che films and Soderbergh moves crisply between different pairs or trios of characters in different locations (his editor is the outstanding Stephen Mirrione).  Yet I found the dispassionate treatment of the story almost unbearably boring.  If the large woman sitting a couple of seats to my left hadn’t parked herself with a coat and a bag and food and drink, I would have tried to leave.

One of the few good things about the 1970s disaster films came from watching actors who sometimes seemed effortful when they were trying harder look at ease:  someone like Faye Dunaway in The Towering Inferno gives the impression of disdaining what she’s doing but her relaxation makes her more humorous, and even more beautiful, than usual.  In Contagion, you certainly don’t feel the cast is slumming it but there’s little pleasure to be had from watching people like Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Marion Cotillard submerge themselves in order to seem like people in a documentary (Fishburne seems uncomfortable anyway under this kind of restraint).  It’s pointless too because the characters are, sooner or later, given piddling dramatic highlights as a reward for their self-effacement and it’s a double frustration that the relatively larger opportunities are supplied to lesser actors – notably Jennifer Ehle, as the scientist who eventually develops the salvational anti-viral vaccine.  Jude Law, as a blogging (Australian?) conspiracy theorist, overacts – in the context of this film anyway.  I sometimes like Matt Damon but, as Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband, he’s unconvincing in his stunned reaction to the news of her death and unmoving in his final, private tears.

John Hawkes is good in the small role of a blue-collar worker at a medical research complex but, among the bigger names, Paltrow is by far the most arresting performer here.  The loss of her life is shocking because she’s so vivid in the flashbacks to her character in Hong Kong, where she caught the bug.  Soderbergh, though, is less interested in Paltrow than in having his camera peer round the Hong Kong settings as if searching for clues at a crime scene.  This objectivity gets tiresome, even though the film’s very last sequence, which succinctly explains the genesis of the virus, is strong.  Critics are educing large, solemn themes from Contagion.  Leo Robson in the TLS is fascinated by the lack of physical contact between characters – the absence of what (he says) makes life worth living – which the situation compels.  That don’t-touch element is occasionally entertaining, although it’s more striking when Marion Cotillard unthinkingly scratches her chin than when Damon’s teenage daughter is withholding physical affection from her boyfriend.  David Denby in the New Yorker pays solemn tribute to the unsentimental nobility of the medical scientists at work in the film.  If their characterisation here as secular saints is a revelation to Denby, you have to assume he expects anyone who wears a lab coat on screen to be a too-clever-by-half fanatic, avid for world domination.  Even so, I came out of the cinema wondering if the prospect of humankind being saved by Jennifer Ehle might be a fate worse than death.  The self-satisfied smile that’s always playing around her lips is bad enough already.  Winning the Nobel Prize that the woman she’s playing is tipped for by the end of Contagion would fix it there forever.

1 November 2011