Contagion
It's the simplicity of the film that grabbed me. The music score is minimal, so much so, it sometimes can barely be heard. There are no dramatic speeches or monologues. There's not even really a main character or a main driving plot, despite a cast featuring the likes of Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Gweneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law. They all play different roles, and react differently, as this mysterious disease, which originates in Hong Kong, spreads. The movie kicks off with Paltrow's character, seated at an airport bar. She is to be one of the early victims of the disease, and is already beginning to show signs of illness, as much of the color has left her face, and she is hacking and coughing frequently. The camera pans down to the bowl of nuts she's been sampling, as well as to the card she uses to pay for her drink, which she hands to the bartender. The movie is already making us uneasy within the first moments, and showing how the disease is already being passed along, as it focuses on objects that we touch everyday. This is the rare movie where a close up of someone touching a door handle can be just as terrifying as your average Hollywood knife-wielding slasher.
Paltrow returns home to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), and young son, and blames her condition on being tired from the flight. She gets worse, however, and collapses a couple days later, going into a seizure, and dies at the hospital. Right around that same time, their boy catches the disease, and suffers the same fate. The husband is checked, and seems to be immune, as is his teenage daughter from his past marriage (Anna Jacoby-Heron), who is visiting him to help him mourn. Mitch becomes afraid, and locks both himself and his daughter away from the outside world. During the rare moments he does step outside, he sees first-hand how everything has changed. He can't even have a funeral for his wife and son, as he is told because they were contagious, the funeral home cannot risk exposing their bodies to the staff or to other mourners.
There are other plots and characters woven into the complex, but not daunting, screenplay provided by Scott Z. Burns. We see various scientists and officials for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) trying to keep the situation under control. The Director of the CDC (Laurence Fishburne) is trying to hold back a growing controversy that he is delivering information and aid to people close to him as the disease spreads, before he releases it to the public. Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is sent to Minneapolis to investigate the epidemic, only to have her workaholic tendencies work against her in her efforts in avoiding getting sick herself. In Hong Kong, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is trying to track down the origins of the illness, and gets wrapped up in the personal plight of the people against her will. Finally, a freelance-blogger named Alex (Jude Law) sees an opportunity when he posts the first video of one of the infected dying on line, and uses his new found fame and attention to benefit himself, and spread his ideals that the CDC is keeping a cure away from the people.
Contagion is a smart movie that looks for the human element in each of its running plotlines, instead of artificial drama. While the movie is not dumbed down, and contains multiple scenes filled with medical and scientific technical talk, it is not so wrapped up in details that we feel lost. It is accessible, without feeling the need to spell everything out for us. I was surprised by how much I ended up feeling for these characters, especially Damon's heartbreaking performance as a family man who has lost almost everything, and wonders why he has to go on. The movie makes it clear early on that his marriage to Paltrow's character was not a perfect one (she was seeing somebody else at the time she contracted the disease), but it does not sensationalize this plot point. It is an added element of tragedy to his character.
I also admired the sense of realism that Soderbergh films everything. Nothing sounds scripted or forced, and there are no contrived situations. All of these characters are trying to survive, go about doing it in different ways, and succeed or fail in different ways. Although a lot of these characters are played by big name actors, they don't feel like "main characters". These are simple people with private lives that are disrupted by this world-wide epidemic. Nobody is competing for screen time here. They are just a small part of the world that the film covers. As the sense of paranoia and dread increases amongst the public, we see glimpses of greed, heroism, compassion, and love. And yet, Soderbergh wisely does not play up these emotions, or seems to be grand-standing. We feel like events are unfolding naturally, rather than everybody's sticking to a script and grand-standing the emotions we're supposed to be feeling.
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