Contagion (2011)
The versatile Steven Soderbergh has made films stretching across myriad genres, while embracing a wide range of production models, throughout a career that includes directing over twenty features, as well as producing and directing a host of other narratives, documentaries, and television.
If not for his connection with the Ocean films, Soderbergh’s career might be judged in a somewhat different light, but those grossly commercial efforts forever stamp him as one of the few directors in recent memory who have the ability to move fluidly between projects of diverse budgets and ambition, and the attendant criticism that goes with the implication of his having sold out. Sure, if you are McG, or Michael Bay, or Brett Ratner, there is no expectation that you will ever create anything of the slightest artistic import. If you are Steven Soderbergh, however, you clearly know better.
It is perhaps this very ability to move in whatever circles he chooses - call it power, or adaptability, or whatever one might deem it, that makes Soderbergh something of an enigma. What is hard to deny is that he is one of the top visual storytellers in cinema (who also shoots his own films), and his compositions are often startlingly original. The man who made Che; Out of Sight; Solaris; Traffic; The Limey; and Sex Lies and Videotape is an intelligent, thought provoking artist with deep pockets of skill at his disposal.
If it were not for the likes of The Ocean Series; and, for instance, Erin Brockovich, one might more easily compare Soderbergh to someone like Michael Winterbottom, another filmmaker who is nearly impossible to categorize or define. Unlike most auteur directors, who traditionally mine personal territory throughout their careers, both of these men continue to take chances, making films about a variety of subjects, and bouncing around with such alacrity that it is challenging to define the themes of their work. The difference, of course, is that Winterbottom (by choice or necessity) doesn’t make films with the kind of budgets at Soderbergh’s disposal.
As Soderbergh talks about taking a sabbatical from filmmaking, we get Contagion, a big, finely crafted, vaguely dystopic/apocalyptic pandemic drama about government health institutions and what might happen if an infectious disease spread throughout the world. The film hearkens to some of the recently made films about world politics like Syriana (Soderbergh was one of the producers) and Babel, and to some extent Soderbergh’s own, Traffic, films that cross language and cultural divides, and seem to point toward our ever flattening world.
Creating a cohesive film with such a sweeping scope is no small task. Contagion was made for sixty million dollars, a huge amount of money to be sure, but nothing close to what is now considered de rigeur for most films of this size, particularly those in the sci fi realm. The idea has been done before, most notably, in Outbreak (1995), but Soderbergh’s entry is masterfully executed, moving though several storylines with whirlwind speed, while managing to give a stratified view of an event over a period of time.
Normally, this type of film suffers from overdone special effects/CGI; sappy, moralizing speeches; maudlin, melodramatic family moments; actors playing technical people who awkwardly spout science to explain the story to an audience; clipped storylines that ultimately leave an audience unsatisfied, or all of the above. Here, Soderbergh (working from a Scott Z. Burns script) mostly manages to stay the course by keeping the pace brisk and judiciously choosing scenes and montage sequences that illuminate without hammering us over the head.
The cast is superb, an embarrassment of riches that includes Gwyneth Paltrow as Beth Emhoff, an American woman who gets sick while traveling to Hong Kong on business; Matt Damon, as her befuddled husband, Mitch; Laurence Fishburne as Doctor Ellis Cheever, a high ranking member of the CDC (Center for Disease Control); Kate Winslet, a CDC investigator working for Cheever; Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, a blogger concerned with government cover up; and Marion Cotilliard as Dr. Leonora Orantes, a researcher for the World Health Organization.
It seems obvious that Burns and Soderbergh, et al, relied on their research, and consultant Dr. Ian Lipkin (head of the school of Public Health at Columbia), for the science feels right. Only a few stumbles (the janitor storyline; a cloyingly saccharine scene toward the end), mar what is an extremely well done procedural examining bureaucracy, the connectivity of the nations of the world, and personal morality in the face of widespread catastrophe.