Contagion

By the time you read this, the idea of what Contagion is will have already infiltrated your brain — that is, unless you are immune to television, the Internet and old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Perhaps you have already come in contact with Contagion directly, an incident attended by such symptoms as a racing heartbeat, teary eyes and a compulsion to avoid close contact with strangers. Regardless of your degree of exposure, you should know that Contagion, while catching, could be thwarted by a number of key defenses, some that occur naturally and some that must be artificially inserted between parasite and host. But you shouldn’t let your defenses get in the way of enjoying this star-studded film about the virus-like nature of so much that surrounds us.

The most successful defense against Contagion would be an innate hatred of Steven Soderbergh, the director of this film and many others including Ocean’s Eleven, Traffic and Erin Brockovich. While Soderbergh’s films tend to garner him fair reviews and nominations for awards, he has a mark that some might find rather acutely painful. As in Ocean’s and its sequel, Ocean’s Twelve, Soderbergh likes to lay the star power on quite thick, which makes the cast list of Contagion read like a roll call for the Oscars’ front row: Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Lawrence Fishburne and on and on. As clearly evidenced in Traffic, Soderbergh is hero-adverse; he prefers his films to be crossword puzzles of interconnecting, yet discreet, vignettes, as opposed to the central-protagonist-plus-supporting-roles format more commonly abused by his directorial peers. Finally — and here’s where Soderbergh is most incendiary to his detractors — the director has a tendency toward heavy-handedness that he seems either unaware of or unapologetic for. One scene near the end of Contagion, in which Fishburne’s character inexplicably introduces a child to the cultural history of handshaking only to thrust the dialogue into shockingly explicit alignment with themes the movie had already made crystal clear, will satisfy the anti-Soderberghian’s conviction that he over-directs his films the way an overzealous baker kneads dough into bricks.

But how well, we must ask, does Contagion accomplish what it set out to do? Ignoring a few of its misfires, we can say that as a thriller it is quite thrilling — our casual fears and sympathies are dramatized to just the right degree of hyperbole so that we are never bored or achingly incredulous. As a display of acting chops, Contagion provides us with top specimens cast safely but smartly, with Winslet, Paltrow and Cotillard rivaling each other for the matriarchal crown. Winslet, I think, wins it — her climactic scene, representing the world’s inhospitality to the persistence of virtue, is heartbreaking. Paltrow, by contrast, succeeds remarkably well at pulling off a seizure. Furthermore, the structure of Contagion — the way it is presented as one story out of many — is architecturally sound in a way many similar films are not; set in motion by a pre-beginning, it builds itself like a rapid tessellation, filling in gaps as quickly as new ones appear.

Letting down one’s defenses, as I’ve already suggested, is an action privileged throughout Contagion’s screenplay, written not by Soderbergh but by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum). This might seem counterintuitive, but those who make the most positive impact on the fight against an outbreak of a lethal virus, which kills its host about five days after infection, are those who act with reckless abandon — scientists, as it turns out, but the kind that grew up wanting to be cowboys. Meanwhile, the hard-working, diligent, noble souls of the World Health Organization and Center For Disease Control who plod incrementally through an organized response seem to face unfairly disastrous ends. Lesson: be a maverick, not a follower, in the face of incomprehensible threat. Shake off the ick factor and test the vaccine on yourself. Do something worth dying for while you’re still alive. The lesson ought not to be lost on moviegoers, for whom Soderbergh logically intends it: forget what harm this film might do to you, and just enjoy the close-quartered company.