Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes, Anna Jacoby-Heron, Demetri Martin, Enrico Colantoni, Chin Han and Armin Rohde
Directed By: Steven Soderbergh
Written By: Scott Z. Burns
Produced By: Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher and Gregory Jacobs
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG-13, for disturbing content and some language.
Running Time: Approximately 106 minutes
Website: contagionmovie.warnerbros.com
Budget: $60 million
Genre: Action/Thriller
Release Date: September 9, 2011
Last Wednesday, a mere two days prior to the nationwide release of the star-studded, global-pandemic thriller, Contagion, the latest big screen effort from Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), Milwaukee’s bow tie-sporting, Public Health Commissioner Bevan Baker confirmed the first reported case of measles in the city since the 2008 outbreak.
Measles is a highly infectious virus that’s spread through direct contact with fluids from an infected person. Young children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems are particularly susceptible. Though completely preventable and considering measles outbreaks are increasingly rare here stateside, Baker nonetheless noted that the virus “can [still] be very serious.”
Speaking of serious, MEV-1, the fictional deadly pathogen that spreads across the globe at a truly frightening rate in the well-cast, well-paced, yet not entirely engrossing Contagion, racks up quite an impressive body count as the good doctors, scientists, and government bureaucrats race against the clock to discover a vaccine before all of mankind is wiped out.
At the film’s open, we hear a woman coughing off-screen. It’s Patient Zero, Beth Emhoff (Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love), a businesswoman from Minneapolis who contacts the MEV-1 virus while abroad on a business trip to Hong Kong. She knows she’s sick, but has no idea that what she thinks is a simple cold or maybe a touch of the flu is far more serious. Her condition quickly deteriorates, and Beth succumbs to the virus much to the shock and disbelief of her blue collar husband Mitch, played by Oscar-winner Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting) who’s the one person she comes in direct contact with that doesn’t catch the virus.
As days and weeks pass and the virus rapidly spreads and mutates, doctors, scientists and government officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) played by the likes of Oscar nominee Laurence Fishburne (What’s Love Got To Do With It?), Oscar winner Kate Winslet (The Reader), Oscar winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), Tony winner Jennifer Ehle (Broadway’s The Real Thing), and Oscar nominee Elliott Gould (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) work separately and together to combat the epidemic.
Writer Scott Z. Burns, who collaborated with Soderbergh on his last feature, the underrated dark comedy The Informant! (in which Damon also starred), has written a thriller with crackerjack aspirations that, while a worthy effort, doesn’t quite reach the heights of greatness and hysteria that the promising first half of the film foretells. Certain subplots lose steam, while others are seemingly abandoned, as if resolution of any kind wasn’t warranted. What Burns does exceptionally well is make the viruses’ symptoms so mundane in comparison to the freak show theatrics (e.g. bleeding orifices, liquefying organs, excessive vomiting) usually associated with films of this genre. So when people start dropping like flies, and in quick succession, the tension is palpable. He and Soderbergh were clearly interested in crafting a plausible film about a real-life possibility aimed at discerning moviegoers. After all, according to some of the world’s leading epidemiologists it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
Contagion is certainly superior to the last global pandemic feature Warner Bros. released – 1995’s Outbreak. And Soderbergh is an old pro when it comes to shepherding a film with a sprawling cast, and he gets some terrific work out of Damon as an Everyman-type trying to keep the one person he has left safe, Fishburne as the ethical head of the CDC (his role is far more substantial than the trailer would lead one to believe), Law as an opportunistic blogger with bad teeth and a potentially disastrous agenda, and Gould, who delivers the film’s best line when he snaps at Law, “Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation.”
Not to be outdone, Winslet, and especially Ehle, who bears a striking resemblance to a 1990s-era Meryl Streep here, deliver superb turns as top-tier specialists in a male-dominated field. And Cotillard, an actress with expressive eyes and incredible range, doesn’t fail to impress as an official from the WHO. The fact that her storyline starts out promising then fizzles along the way serves as a kind of metaphor for the film itself.
2.5 Stars
