Steven Soderbergh has always been an articulate director, quick to try new ideas and test various theories; in the case of “Contagion,” his new pandemic thriller, he's been upfront about the number of things he and writer Scott Z. Burns didn’t want to indulge in, a kind of cliché deterrence list. No around-the-globe montages, no shots of the president or the government deliberating; in short, nothing beyond the scope of what each individual character would see or be doing. It’s a noble goal, and Soderbergh is always at his best when he’s investigating process; for roughly the first half of “Contagion,” he creates a fascinating study of the ground-level grunt work involved in identifying, studying, containing and ultimately curing a mystery uber-disease. That the last act of the film fails so precipitously is another mystery altogether.

The multi-thread narrative kicks off with Gwyneth Paltrow returning home from a business trip, contaminated by the mystery illness; its no spoiler to say that she’s dead within minutes of her first appearance. More disturbing is how quickly her son contracts the illness and also perishes. Matt Damon is the grieving husband, step father to the deceased young boy and frantic to protect the still healthy daughter from his first marriage. Laurence Fishburne is the head of the CDC, who quickly dispatches field agent Kate Winslet to gather information  and coordinate quarantine zones; meanwhile, we get a fairly extensive first hand look at scientists trying to identify and quantify the disease. These early scenes are largely fantastic, with just the right amount of technical jargon to sound intelligent and legitimately realistic, shot and cut with a brisk efficiency.

To his credit, Soderbergh's mis-en-scene nicely accentuates the proceedings. He places his camera at a restrained distance from the action, not as some kind of under-a-microscope affectation, but in an effort to capture the human figure within a specific, particular space. Scenes unfold without adornment, and on several occasions, the restraint gives way to huge cavernous spaces (Winslet commandeering a school gym as an internment space for the infected) or more subjective POVs (odd flashbacks that trace Paltrow’s Chinese business trip cum eventual infection). The contrasts prove to be startlingly effective—up to a point. 

Damon is nicely understated and surprisingly shlubby (he’s always been able to slip nicely into ‘regular guy’ roles) as the put-upon father, and Winslet is another standout, all firm resolve and we-don’t-have-time-for-this brusqueness. Her dealings with local bureaucrats and idiotically dense red tape are the kind of nuts-and-bolts grittiness usually glazed over in thrillers. Marion Cotillard fairs less well in a tossed off abduction subplot (pity the lack of a larger exploration of tensions between nations), while Jude Law hams it up as a disgusting blogger fermenting political discontent online. His role is a remarkably missed opportunity—as more than a few critics have pointed out, one of the film’s key themes is information spreading like a disease, and doing about as much harm. That’s a fascinating hook, but Law overplays the entire thing, aided and abetted by a ridiculous snaggle tooth peeking from beneath his lips, which may as well be a mustache for him to twirl.

And then there's the last act. It’s a kind of irony that so much of the early goings on in the film are seriously contracted, lingering on details and minutia only to then collapse seemingly two hours of narrative material into 30 or so minutes. Some critics have claimed that Soderbergh is ‘cold,’ perhaps as a result of the steady accumulation of so much detail and, yes, the avoidance of cliché. Yet the film ends with a flurry of useless activity, as narratives reach predictable end points and fairly standard emotional closure abounds. By the end of the film, something like over one hundred million people have died, but there’s a lack of scope at play. We don’t feel the absence of these people. (One cliché Soderbergh doesn’t avoid: piles and piles of garbage on a city street as a cheap symbol of societal disintegration.)

I’m not suggesting “Contagion” should play like the more apocalyptic entries in this genre—the collapse on display here is not on the level of "The Road," or Haneke’s "The Time of the Wolf." In fact, an interesting (yet relatively unexplored) moment late in the film has Damon enter a shopping mall, followed by an elliptical cut, eliding some kind of narrative information from the audience. Damon’s wrist is scanned by an employee, giving him entry to an upscale dress store. We soon learn people given a vaccine also receive a wrist ban, complete with bar code that grants them access to public spaces. It’s an interesting idea, but again, the process leading to the implementation of such a device is truncated. Another lost opportunity, to my mind: investigating how commerce would respond to such an epidemic could have been a fascinating subplot. There’s no lack of ideas or ambition on Soderbergh’s part, but his desire to sidestep the trivial goes too far—he leaves too much wasted potential on the cutting room floor. One wishes he would take the chance of boring us in an effort to show us something truly new.

Review by:
Daniel Gorman