I can’t decide whether Steven Soderbergh is a visionary or hopelessly out-of-touch. The cinematic topic for the year has been joblessness and he’s worrying about the bird flu. Contagion is a fear film. The end of society, civilization, whatever. There have been two or three of these every year since they first started showing a guy gurgling saliva on film. And the message is always the same – want to live? Don’t leave the house, answer the phone, have a life and for God’s sake don’t touch anything, ever! Even yourself.
Contagion opens in Day 2 of crisis – with Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) doing her best to spread germs at an airport cocktail bar. The camerawork is good – everything she touches gets an extra linger. Secondary contact is followed. We care little for the stranger at the bar, the bartender, the passing flight attendant, but we see clearly the peanut dish Beth touched and the glass she drank from and the path she walks as she leaves the bar. It’s almost a horror film. The dread is present; you have to know what to look for. She comes home to Mitch (Matt Damon) and pretty soon people start dying and doctors are involved and chaos slowly takes over. Personally, I love how all citizens know that the bat-pig virus (no, I’m not making this up) is spread by human contact, but that doesn’t stop people from rioting, looting and general teeming in large masses about the city.
Armageddon-by-a-whimper films are nothing without statistics straight from the ministry of propaganda. CDC Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet) claims people touch their faces 3-5 times every waking minute, up to 2,000 times per day. I’m sorry, but BULLSHIT. There’s no way this is true. This isn’t even true among a group of 3rd Base coaches eternally stuck at fantasy camp. Well, what do you expect from a film that shows us a wintry driveway and states “Minneapolis: Population 3.3 Million” in big block letters? Um, fellas, the population of Minneapolis is a shade under 400,000. The population of Hennepin County is 1.1 M. The greater Twin Cities metro area has a population of 2.85 M. Getting closer, sort of. Is that what you meant?
When Contagion is not shaming America’s blatant lack of personal privacy (oh, that’s just sooo us), Soderbergh and Co. apparently had an axe to grind. Get this, we have a bad guy. Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, an internet blogger with a large following (12 million) who is out to deliberately mislead the public in an effort to get rich. I’ll give Soderbergh points for style here; it’s not everybody who is standing up and shouting, “the U.S. government has it right!” Still, the thesis here seems to be that the internet is full of misinformation and it’s important you know this. Wow. Hard hitting stuff. Next film he’s gonna do an exposé on the misleading nature of pro-wrestling and how it affects you. Spreading his lies, Alan manages to take in $4.5 M in a period of weeks. It was unclear to me how exactly Mr. Krumwiede has managed to rake the public for so much money. I would love to meet the blogger who can make $4.5 M on the net doing anything. I don’t think it’s possible, even if the world is ending. Aw, forget the “how,” just know bloggers are liars (especially me!); the internet is just is a bunch of jerks and the government ought to be trusted. Did I get that right?
BTW, did you catch the part where Contagion scorns bloggers for dishonesty while promoting its own set of misinformation?
I wasn’t especially happy with Contagion. You could say I didn’t catch the fever, so-to-speak. I didn’t like that Matt Damon spent so little time mourning his wife and child. I didn’t like how cavalier health professionals were with their lives and, honestly, I didn’t like the body count. 26 million? That’s it? That’s not even California. You want to make an end-of-the-world scenario, you should at least wipe out Europe, y’know?
Rated PG-13, 106 Minutes
D: Steven Soderbergh
W: Scott Z. Burns
Genre: Paranoia
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Conspiracy theorists, internet haters.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who think cashing in on fear is disgusting
