Contagion (2011)
Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded Contagion is a disaster movie of the plague variety, a highly topical expression of modern anxiety induced by the back-to-back scares of swine and bird flu that shocked the globe in the years leading up to the films release. Contagion plays to Soderbergh’s strengths, maneuvering between an ensemble cast with tight pacing and a bevy of plot subversions to keep the audience engaged. It’s a labyrinthian display of the slow churn of bureaucracy, and the personal elements that so often remain invisible to the public during crisis situations. This is Soderbergh’s greatest feat with Contagion, his ability to make the apocalyptic relatable, the unfathomable all too terrifyingly real.
The big draw for Contagion is of course it’s A-list cast of celebrities. Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Lawrence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Marion Cotillard form our main ensemble, a powerhouse lineup of household names sure to get seats in the theater. The way these actors are used is quite honestly more interesting than any of their performances, which seem almost perfectly, purposely typecast. Matt Damon basically plays Matt Damon, nice guy, family man, protector, survivor, average joe. Jude Law, fresh off his role as Watson in Sherlock Holmes takes on again the role of renegade truth seeker, yet here that role is a facade even for his character, who sells out to the pharmaceutical companies he was so quick to rail against on his website. Perennial love interest starlet Gwyneth Paltrow has perhaps the most interesting subversion of her usual role. Cast as Matt Damon’s wife, we quickly learn about her extramarital activities that would help set the decimating virus in motion. Considering her most recent, most prominent role prior to Contagion, Tony Stark’s overly responsible love interest in Iron Man, to make her a cheating patient zero for a horrifically disgusting virus is almost whiplash inducing. All this subversion of typical star roles serves to let the audience know that no one here is safe, and that things are never quite as they appear on the surface.
Contagion’s other great feat is managing to craft a compelling cinematography in a movie where it’s main threat is invisible to the naked eye, much less a digital camera. There are almost no shots in this film where two characters are in frame together, giving the whole movie a sense of isolation. When we see Matt Damon’s daughter touching her boyfriend it’s almost jarring. There’s also a severe lack of camera movement — still shots dominate the majority of the run time, giving the viewer a sense of voyeurism, of fly on the wall privacy violation. There’s an anxiety to every scene, to be expected in a thriller with such heavy weight to the implications of it’s plot. These cinematographic choices give the film an impeccable realism, a crucial element for a film grounded in very real fears. It also helps that the team behind Contagion did their research, basing the fictional MEV-1 virus on the real world Nipah virus. The scientific elements of the film, the research and experimentation, the gory autopsies, the sterilized hospital laboratories, they all feel a bit too real, a bit too possible. The failure to quickly and effectively stop the spread of a lethal infectious disease is a reality that almost all keep out of their thoughts, until a film like Contagion so realistically brings these fears to life. If this was Soderbergh’s goal, he accomplished it with flying colors.
