Film Friday: Contagion (2011)

Contagion begins with one person passing a disease to another. They spread it to others. All these people die within the first couple minutes of the film. The next few minutes involve CDC members trying to track down where the disease began. From there, the film becomes the disjointed story of several individuals who really don’t do anything, nor are they interesting. Indeed, nothing about this film is interesting.

** spoiler alert **

Though critics fawn over him, Steven Soderbergh is hit or miss as a director. For every Sex, Lies and Videotape and Ocean’s Eleven there’s a Solaris and The Informant!. When he hits, he’s provocative and stylistic. When he misses, he’s predictable and boooring. Contagion is a “realistic” portrayal of a highly contagious and lethal virus spreading through the modern world. “Realistic” is in quotes because the film takes itself very seriously, but there’s no substance behind the air of realism. In this regard, Contagion is like Soderbergh’s Traffic: polished, serious, and intensely shallow.

Contagion acts like it’s presenting a scientific and non-fictiony view of virus-events, only it really isn’t. There’s almost no science presented and the serious tone masks the fact that the story is nothing more than a couple characters making uninteresting personal decisions. We do see the virus pass from person to person, but only for a minute or two -- Outbreak did this with much greater tension, as have most zombie films. They also try to track down the first person to get the disease, which could be interesting, except it gets resolved almost instantly and they don’t even tell us why it matters. At one point, they seal off Chicago, which could be interesting, except you don’t get to see it happen.

So what do we get instead? Instead, the film is about bureaucrats harassing Kate Winslet for no reason, Laurence Fishburne agonizing over bringing home one CDC employee when two million have already died and calling his fiancé to tell her to leave Chicago, which briefly becomes a scandal that goes nowhere. We also see Matt Damon agonize that he can’t open the door to his house to let his daughter’s boyfriend in for a quickie, and Marion Cotillard makes an appearance as a doctor, though I honestly can’t tell you why. Elliot Gould appears too for some reason. Yawn.

The only thing this film really offers that’s somewhat original is Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, an anti-government, conspiracy-theory blogger who sells his soul to a hedge fund and tells people they can cure this disease with snake oil. This is about as close as the film gets to an interesting storyline. Yet, while the film spends a lot of time on his character, you are never once shown any effect his actions have on anything. He just talks about getting a lot of page hits and the CDC people are upset at him. But it’s never even clear if he’s lying or what motivates him, nor do you ever see a single person get hurt following his advice.

So how could this film have been improved?

Well, for one thing, it needs focus. The Andromeda Strain created a compelling plot by focusing on whether or not the disease would escape the lab. Quarantine focused on a small group of people trapped with the infected as the government tried to bury the problem. The Crazies showed a group of uninfected trying to escape a town the government sealed off. Zombie movies, like Pontypool and Day of the Dead, thrive in portraying the early moments before the public is aware what is happening, and in showing the exponential math of infection. The Stand took another approach and built around the survivors, even as the virus was only starting. Twelve Monkeys showed mankind trying to rebuild afterwards. In each of these instances, the film followed characters whose survival was important. Their stories became the story of how the disease either spread or was stopped. As they learned information, you learned information, as they lost friends, you felt the loss. This pulled you in to the story.

Contagion isn’t like that. None of the characters in Contagion actually matter. If they all died in an industrial blender the moment the film began, not a single thing would change in the virus portion of the story. Even worse, these characters never learn anything they can pass on to the audience. Instead, the information is presented over radio broadcasts or it appears on the screen like an update. Thus, there’s no mystery and you have little actual connection to the virus story, it just seems to be going on in the background, even though these characters are presented as the most relevant characters to watch. That makes the film feel somewhat fraudulent bereft of drama.

Compare this film to Outbreak. Outbreak fell apart when it did the “crazed soldier” thing toward the end, but until that point the film was quite strong. Outbreak followed one character who had the ability to discover, diagnose and treat the virus, and it became the story of his race against the clock and the seemingly real hurdles he faced. Throughout the film, we knew little more than he did, and when we did it was used for dramatic effect. By comparison, in Contagion information gets handed out regularly and with little drama. For example, you will suddenly see the words, “2.3 million dead” written on the screen, which should be horrific except it’s just a number the way it gets presented. Moreover, in Outbreak, people close to the hero died, people we got to know. In Contagion, you almost never see anyone die and when you do, they are typically introduced as they are dying. So they’re all strangers.

This is why Contagion went wrong: it pretended it was a realistic portrayal of the spread of a deadly virus, but it gave us no realism, no science, no mystery, and no characters who mattered to the virus story. And the personal stories of the characters we were given just weren’t interesting, nor did they ultimately feel particularly relevant to anything. This was how Traffic felt. That was a film that seemed on the surface to be a serious exploration of the drug trade from Mexico to the United States, but there was no depth and nothing we hadn’t seen before. And the characters you did follow weren’t relevant to the larger point of the film, except that they were all anecdotally touched by the drug trade. It’s the same thing here. These characters don’t drive the story, they are passengers, people who kind-of-sort-of relate to the spreading of the virus.

Ultimately, a genuine story about the spread of a disease could be a fascinating film, but it needs to offer more than a glossy version of every other virus story. It needs to connect to the real people who make decisions so the audience can see how the important people would respond and the challenges they face, and it needs to connect us to the scale of death in a very personal way. Simply reading numbers of dead is not enough. Contagion does none of this.