“CONTAGION”
Written by Scott Z. Burns
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
** ½ (two and a half stars)
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot “The Hollow Men” (1925)
Each and every day of my working life over the last thirteen years, I have found myself on the front lines in the battle between my immune system and germs, infections and viruses in my role as a preschool teacher. The very first year I taught was the sickest I had been in many years. Over time, I have built up a fairly resistant tolerance but every so often, I will find myself hit and laid out by a strand of something rather ferocious. In fact, anytime there is that spine-tingling moment when I fear that one of my charges is just about to launch a nasty cough or worse yet, a mucus filled sneeze directly into my face, and then does just so, the voice in my head quietly utters to me with finality, “Oh Hell, I’m dead!” (To those people who think that teachers are just shiftless layabouts who skim the real working people’s hard earned cash out from under them, I challenge them to handle one day in a preschool classroom when fingers are often launched inside noses, urine is caked upon toilet seats, floors and clothing and when one of those adorable little moppets vomits…oh, but I digress…)
If those rapidly depicted images made you squirm in your seats, then I think you would easily be able to gather the intent behind “Contagion,” a new thriller from Director Steven Soderbergh, which traces the rapid birth of a lethal airborne virus and its equally rapid devastating effects worldwide. Now, I typically avoid films of this nature as I just do not see the appeal of essentially paying my good money to passively watch the world’s destruction. Yet, the trailers, the cast that Soderbergh obtained intrigued me and Soderbergh’s pedigree was more than enough to get me to buy a ticket. Unfortunately, as with some of Soderbergh’s more recent films (like the abhorrent “The Informant!” from 2009), “Contagion,” while not a bad film, was a surprisingly underwhelming, unemotional and an overly cluttered disappointment.
The opening passages of “Contagion” strongly introduce the film’s terrifying concept. On day 2 on the pandemic, we hear the sound of Beth Emhoff’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) raspy cough while on a business trip in Hong Kong. Upon her return to Minnesota, her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and family, Beth becomes increasingly lethargic, weak, feverish and soon collapses onto the kitchen floor enveloped within a seizure. Meanwhile a young waiter in Hong Kong and a model in London begin exhibiting the exact same symptoms, all of whom are dead after only a few days on contracting the new, unknown virus which will soon be dubbed “MEV-1.”
The remainder of the film depicts the wrenching struggle to contain and defeat the virus by focusing on several characters, which include: Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the Center for Disease Control and his doomed assistant Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet); Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), who attempts to discover the potential virus origins in Hong Kong; Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), an abrasive, sensationalist freelance internet journalist; and also a variety of doctors (played by Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould and Demetri Martin) all bravely trying to stop the virus from overtaking the world.
Unlike so many other types of films of this nature, “Contagion” is sleek, taut, smartly accomplished and extremely notable due to its lack of histrionics. Soderbergh takes an almost clinical approach to this material as the film often feels like a procedural docudrama as much time is spent listening to the science of the virus and the attempts to discover where it originated from, how it continues to mutate and certainly, how to find a cure. The film’s cinematography by Peter Andrews (which is indeed Soderbergh’s pseudonym) is crisply detailed to the point of being nearly antiseptic, a nice ironic visual touch as this film is a germaphobe’s nightmare. Soderbergh is also deeply aided by the mostly electronic music score by his frequent composer Cliff Martinez, a score which often recalled the classic turbulent film scores by Tangerine Dream from the 1980's. The musical synthetics percolate to a menacing level, darkly underscoring the story’s grim outlook.
Beyond the aesthetics, what I did appreciate most about “Contagion” is that at its core, it is a film that is decidedly about the pros and cons of our humanity. Soderbergh is not one to stand upon any sort of cinematic soapbox as Oliver Stone or Spike Lee accomplish so brilliantly. He simply lays out the details for us in a matter-of-fact fashion allowing us to make any connections, determinations and realizations along the way for ourselves. This tactic is crucial for a film of this nature because, if anything, “Contagion” is a film about us. We see ourselves in noble, selfless ways and also at our most brutal, and at our most frustratingly careless. Soderbergh seems to be arguing that our collective survival or end is entirely in our hands and if we just don’t wash those hands then God help us all.
And yet, “Contagion,” as a whole did not entirely work for me.
For all of its “up to the minute” medical, technological and scientific sheen, in many ways, “Contagion” feels like a 21st century version of a classic 1970s disaster film as filtered through Steven Soderbergh’s at times self-congratulatory artistic cinematic lens. As with those earlier movies, “Contagion” essentially tells the story of the all star cast battling the pandemic through a series of interconnected storylines, some of which work well, some of them not so well, and sadly for me, none of them were present enough for me to fully engage with.
Partially, this has been a frequent problem I have had with Soderbergh’s films as of late. There is absolutely no question that he is a born filmmaker. I am just feeling that he is once again going out of his way to show us how intelligent he is and how skilled of a filmmaker he is at the expense of creating a film that is truly engaging. Yes, I did praise the film for not dolling out any standard Hollywood disaster film screaming and wailing. But, there are other ways to engage an audience.
Frankly, I was just surprised with how little I was affected or disturbed by a film with this subject matter, but actually, all of the multiple storylines called attention to themselves simply by their presence. They existed just because they existed and not because it made the overall story flow smoothly. Once I became interested and wanted to know more about a character and their relationship to the worldwide tragedy, the film zipped along to another storyline starring yet another celebrity (more on that in a bit). It all felt to be a big distraction. When it is all said and done, “Contagion” is a primal film about our survival and yet, I felt almost nothing by the film’s conclusion in part due to its creaky formula and the director’s tendency to show off.
Don’t get me wrong. There are individual scenes, sequences and moments that contained large amounts of power. I especially loved the moments, mostly contained within Matt Damon’s character and performance where he had to shoulder a host of conflicting emotions simultaneously and he was able to convey each and every one. Moments of grief, betrayal, confusion, horror and parental protectiveness, for example are written all over Damon’s face and body language as are moments where emotions of love and loss are buried due to the necessity of having to deal with more immediate dangers. With this performance, Matt Damon has proved once again that he is one of the most skilled actors of his generation. I also loved moments featuring his healthy yet quarantined teenaged daughter (well played by Anna Jacoby-Heron) and how Soderbergh made some time to depict restless teen angst and heartache, showing that even teenaged love can still exist at the apparent end of the world.
Again, I ultimately just didn’t care all that much. I needed this film to burrow under my skin and consume me with dread but it just kept me at arms length for much of its running time. In fact, I wished that perhaps the film had simply centered around Matt Damon’s character (with Fishburne and Winslet’s characters as the crucial supporting members), and we, the audience, could view the apocalypse through his eyes like Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s overwhelming “War Of The Worlds” (2005) for example. I think that precise attention to character could have made “Contagion” more distressing than it was for me.
That observation actually leads me to my next criticism, something I alluded to earlier: the film’s casting. There are absolutely no bad performances within the film, and I would not expect anything less from Soderbergh. But, he again seems to be suffering from his self-congratulatory adoration of movie stars and casting them because of their fame rather than if they were, without question, the very best people for the role in question or if they were necessary at all. Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet all bring their skills and personalities into their roles and as usual, I would have followed them anywhere. Yet, Soderbergh would not allow me to become more deeply involved with them because he just had to have more celebrities to shuffle on and off the screen, especially as many of them do not share any scenes together. Unfortunately, and despite their strong work, whenever the film turned to Marion Cotillard’s character or Jude Law’s character, my mind began to wander. It felt as if there were just two or even three subplots too many and it hindered the film’s overall focus for my tastes.
Beyond that, is there any reason at all that Gwyneth Paltrow was cast? It is not a spoiler to announce to you that her character dies within the first few minutes of the film (as seen in the trailer and commercials) so why is it that she had to play this role? It seemed more important for Soderbergh to cast Gwyneth Paltrow than to make his story that much tighter. Now Soderbergh has juggled several storylines and has employed major stars many times before and to much better effect in films like “Traffic” (2000) and “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001). Perhaps if “Contagion” were longer, more of an epic like “Traffic,” maybe that would have justified and served the amount of characters and storylines that much better. As it stands, we have a film which is well under two hours and it does feel fairly overstuffed.
Dear readers, “Contagion," if I were to recommend it to you, it would be a soft one at best. It's definitely not something I feel that anyone should avoid. There is much to admire about it and I did appreciate the intelligence in front of and behind the scenes. Steven Soderbergh remains a masterful filmmaker who began over 20 years ago with the groundbreaking “sex, lies and videotape” (1989) and had an incredible streak of high quality films featuring “Out Of Sight” (1998), “The Limey” (1999), and “Erin Brockovich” (2000) and the aforementioned “Traffic” and “Ocean’s Eleven.” As he has already announced his plans for retirement, I still have high hopes that he can again knock one over the fences. But, for now and again, I needed to feel something with “Contagion” and in the end, the film itself wound up like the apocalypse on screen as everything and everyone is quietly snuffed out without any sense of cringe-inducing passion.
Or better yet, that gut wrenching fear I feel whenever a child sneezes directly into my face.
No comments:
Post a Comment