Review: Contagion (2011)

Contagion is that oddest of films, a thriller without many thrills, an ensemble cast that could have been cast aside without much lost and a story where I ended up caring about no one at all. It is the latest film from Steven Soderberg, the mercurial director who vacillates between art films like the salacious Sex, Lies and Videotapes (1989), bizarre and ultimately unfulfilling Bubble (2005) and beautifully shot The Limey (1999) and more mainstream fare like the engaging Out of Sight (1998) and megahits like Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2000) and the Ocean triplet (2001, 2004, 2007). With Contagion we see a mixture of the two ends of his cinematic bipolarity. On one hand, the film is beautifully shot, with lovely long shots, pans, transitional editing and even sound editing. There also appears to be the artistic pretense of making a thriller without the actors acting terribly thrilled, or for that matter scared, happy, angry or sad. Instead there is a deadpan quality to the acting that seems to belie the action that surrounds them. One assumes this was done on purpose, or that Soderberg just achieved the worst collective performances by actors in recent history. On the other hand, this was a major studio release with a budget of $60 million and that aforementioned cadre of stars including Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law and Marion Cotillard, among many others.

Yet the bipolarity of the film doesn’t really save it from failure in my estimation. It seems to lack a clear point, compelling acting or even a narrative that will stick with the audience. The plot plods along as the list of dying increases and officials race to figure out the source of the disease and a way to vaccinate the living. In the end, humanity is saved, after serious bouts with our darkest animal instincts (shown through a serious of small riots and violence), and a central character is outed as a corrupt media personality faking overcoming the disease for profit. Family life is restored, friends and lovers are reunited and makes a grand gesture to a janitor. But it is all done with so little emotion and verve, I ended up wondering what the point was? Is it a critique of a culture of fear? Pure artistic pretense to create a thriller that breaks all the conventions of the genre? If so, the obvious answer is why? Or is it merely a film that fails to capture the essence of its charge – to entertain, engage and ultimately ask some question of the audience? Instead it appears to have all the answers, and most of them provide a rather cynical portrait of America and humanity in general.

However, I think the film does bring up three themes in the subtext that are quite fascinating. The first relates to the role of fear in the spectacle society, where mediated reality is always heightened for affective impact. Most of the paranoia that streams through the public and characters in the film is overwrought. They believe there is a huge government conspiracy, when that is not the case. Millions listen to an online “journalist” (Jude Law) who is so clearly framed as unlikable I’m not sure why we care when he turns out to be a fraud. There are charges of corruption levied against one of the leaders in the fight to stem the disease (Dr. Ellis Cheever) that are also proven largely false. In fact, one of the major weaknesses of the film is a general lack of deeper tension or character arc. The characters are drawn as thin as the shavings from the paper the script was printed on. This moves us in the direction of the second major theme, which is an underlying sociopathology that springs up in many of his films. Yes the main characters in this film are doctors and epidemiologists who must divorce personal feelings from their jobs, but even the father who loses his cheating wife and son, appears largely unaffected except for the scene when he is told his wife is dead. From then on, we either see humans acting as savages in pursuit of food or a cure or as robotic technocrats that can’t seem to add any emotive inflection to anything they say or do, from a CDC doctor that is about to die to a WHO agent in Hong Kong who is kidnapped. This lack of emotional connection to what they say or the scene around them seems to comport well with our age and maybe speaks to an extremely troubling broader trend that I have touched on in this blog.

The final theme, which I believe is true of most of his films, though in some cases it works out, is a strong inclination for style over content. Soderberg is a filmmaker who is interested in film as an art form, and I respect him for that. But like Gus Van Sant, he too often makes mainstream films that forget that movies are supposed to entertain as well as push the boundaries of artistic creativity and ingenuity. Godard and Trouffaut, to name two, were consistently pushing French cinema in new directions, but they did it in a way that was compelling to the audience. The same can be said of Woody Allen in the 70s, Fellini, Antonioni, Altman, early Welles and even the often disappointing De Palma. And while many critics seemed to like this film, I’m not sure why. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer argued in their famous essay about the culture industry, style too often trumps content, leaving the audience wanting something more. I find this as true of this film as so many action or romantic comedies these days, so tied to their formulaic genre codes that they can’t seem to even make the jokes funny or the story interesting. As style trumps quality from the high art film to the basest pop culture flick, we are on the cusp of destroying yet another of the artistic forms available today. Is this why cable television is pulling in so many stars? In total, this is a film that seems to fall short of the genre to which it is attached. I would actually rather watch Dustin Hoffman overact his way through Outbreak (1995), watch the disturbing 28 films or find a copy of the excellent old HBO film And the Band Plays On than subject myself to this tripe. C-