Review: Contagion (spoiler-free)
Sometime around now… maybe earlier in the summer… Steven Soderbergh was expecting to be coming out with his most commercial non-Ocean’s film in a decade, Moneyball.
Didn’t turn out that way.
So what comes out of the quiver in response? A masterpiece bound by the genre it lives in, but a masterpiece all the same. As Out of Sight flipped the romantic comedy and Erin Brockovich flipped the do-gooder movie and Ocean’s XX riffed on the rat pack flick, Contagion drives Steven right into Irwin Allen territory, where he uses all of his craft and collaborators to make a film that never feels like the schlockfest it could well have been.
Simply stated, Contagion is about the life of a pandemic. How does it start? How does it spread? How do governments react? How do regular people react? How will they stop it? Can they stop it?
There really is no star of this film. Matt Damon is the most consistent presence, offering the audience a regular guy to identify with, though Scott Z. Burns’ script pushes that too. Damon’s behavior is not always comforting. There are unexpected notes… and that’s what makes the film (in that element) so much more than The Towering Influeza.
In the early stages, as we meet hot doctors, from a sponged down Kate Winslet to Marion Cotillard to Jennifer Ehle, the fear of stunting grew in my belly. But all of them settle into being the great actresses that they are and their roles in this worldwide drama and the fear subsided.
Throughout the film, the characters behave in ways that make sense to their characters. They rarely feel symbolic. They are each pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle laid out by Scott Burns. Just when you think you may be on to a stock character in Jude Law’s raging blogging tweeting defrocked journalist… ambiguity leans in and reminds us yet again that these are real people.
The thing that freaks people out about this film is the same thing I experienced – and most of you probably have – looking though medical magazines and seeing those giant pictures of the organisms that live all around us, including on our bodies. If you think too much about it, it’s paralyzing. And indeed, when you walk out of Contagion, you will look at the door handles of the theater and the parking ticket validation machine and your lunch a little differently.
So let me ask you… are you going to the movies to get numb or to feel something?
Winslet kills in this movie… it’s one of her best pieces of work… incredibly subtle and egoless and not just for lack of make-up. It’s performances like this that make the film work as art and not show biz. Loved Elliot Gould. Jennifer Ehle has two supporting roles this next month that make a lot out of a little screen time. Laurence Fishburne is a solid central wheel, clearly now entering the third act of his career. But it’s all the little pieces and small parts that really glue this film together. Matt Damon is a star, but Anna Jacoby-Heron, in her first film, as his daughter, is absolutely critical to giving him ground from which to push off.
Cliff Martinez delivers the best score of the year so far. Stephen Mirrione, on the Avid, keeps everything moving along but comprehensible. Peter Andrews does beautiful work here (for a bald guy) and helps keep clarity with subtle (and some not so subtle) variations of the look from story segment to story segment. And all the other departments are top of the line.
Scott Z. Burns delivers his second great screenplay collaboration. This project was never more than a few inches from being a hyperbolic, cartoony mess. And both in words and structure, Burns hits it out of the park. One never knows how these collaborations work between writer and director, so off-the-set, one never knows who made the choice for a character not to speak, for instance. But when a movie like this clicks, a lot of credit has to go to the architect. It’s almost impossible for it work so well without those very strong blue prints.
And Soderbergh… still one of the dozen great veteran filmmakers working in the world. There are those who would look to more arch artists around the globe and hold Soderbergh as too accessible (before slaughtering any film he makes that is experimental). But much as I would love to see what Francis Coppola or Scorsese would do with virtually any script being produced at any studio at any time… that’s how I feel about Soderbergh. He’s missed. But he’s out there swinging. He is A FILMMAKER. He is not satisfied to just go by the book. Like The Coens and Kubrick and Van Sant, he’s planting seeds when you watch his work. And he is not so worried about whether you leave the theater with a handful of flowers… you’ve been infected.
Contagion is one of those films that will be, as Soderbergh is, taken for granted by some critics. But it’s so much better than just being a thriller… which it is. It makes the audience a part of the world he is creating, whether that’s the scientific world or the world of loss or the world of longing… and he allows us in without telling us he’s being generous or making us work too hard or letting us off too easily.
It seems antithetical, but breathe the movie in and you will get the bug. Keep the mask on and you’ll get part of it – which still may be fun – but it will take longer for the whole experience to sink in… if it ever does.
I found Contagion pretty flat after the terrific opening 30 minutes or so, and thought the daughter in particular was awfully wooden. There’s a dopey very-special-episode-of-ER vibe to it that put me off: all the women are Sherry Stringfield types (competent, committed, sincere) and all the men are variations on Dr. Greene. It’s admirably square, I guess. Can’t disagree with your take on Winslet, though: egoless is a good way to put it. She grounded it very nicely — for a while.
Contagion was great; found it very cold and distant and then it wallops you with a heavy emotional ending … glad that Scott Burns is one of the writers on Man From U.N.C.L.E. …
so psyched to see this
I thought it was interesting that they show you Paltrow dies in the trailer. Is that a draw for people somehow? Because the last movie I saw her in she killed herself after a successful country-singer arena concert comeback. Which, was either laughably ridiculous as Gwen pretends to be like Faith Hill or retrospectively pretty interesting as a dead inside shiny blond tries to fake her way through a tastefully choreographed and non-threatening spiritual uplift type beautiful barbie thing.
Is there more to the plot than what was shown in the trailer? This was one of those where I figured I got most of the whole movie: Gwen catches disease, travels back to the U.S., passes it on, it spreads, doctors try to figure it out, it spreads, government starts freaking out, it spreads, government freaks out more, etc.
It looks well done, but I feel like I’ve seen this movie so many times before and now I’ve seen it again in trailer form.
Gwyneth, while an important launching pad, is a tiny part of the film as a character. Damon plays her husband and he’s more central. But there is a lot that the materials don’t even try to get into.
Speaking of possibly small roles, does Jude Law do anything but look like his head’s about to explode? Seriously, those one-second shots of his face in the ads do him NO favors.
I think people will be surprised by how big the crisis becomes and how quickly it happens in the film, which is one thing you could maybe glean from the trailer giving away Paltrow’s early death. Also, I really like the way you end the review, DP because it underscores that, all those Oscar winners notwithstanding, the central character of the film is none of them; it’s the virus.
Mike: I know we all get bugged when it seems a trailer is giving away a movie’s key plot points, but I’m getting a little tired of the notion that a two-minute trailer can somehow give you the experience of the movie. As if the other 90+ minutes will contain nothing of interest. “Well, for all I know the acting is genius, the dialogue is brilliant and the direction is stunning, but the way some hack has cut the trailer together tells me everything I really need to know.”
And yes, I realize that, conversely, the ‘hacks’ sometimes make a sow’s ear look like it will be a silk purse; just making a general point.
This looks fantastic. Will it get people going to the theater again after a couple slow weeks? Is opening during the NFL’s opening weekend going to eat into the male audience?
This is one of those movies where the ads and trailers minimize what the movie really is, narrowing it down to something that is perceived as marketable.
But I don’t know that it will do a ton of business. In a sane world, it’s a $120m+ domestic movie.
Of course, the real life plague Gwyneth inspires is called Coldplay…
Zing
Here’s hoping sanity prevails.
Is there a scene where a CG bird sits on a throne and laughs maniacally?
Yancy – that’s exactly how I feel about the trailers for Moneyball, where I know the entire plot, but I’m going to enjoy the performances, dialog, etc. There it’s the journey.
For me (and I could be alone on this), Contagion looks like a procedural, so I’d want to see it for the plot, to see if it goes somewhere I didn’t expect or that I haven’t seen before. I’d want to see Contagion for the destination. The trailer warns me that I have seen it before in other movies and the track it’s going to take, which is why I’m hoping to learn there’s more to it than what the trailer gives away.
I don’t get it, Anghus.
Every time i see the trailer, Laurence Fishburne talks about “no one needs to weaponize the bird flu because the birds are already doing it.”
Hence, the malicious cackling bird villain antagonist.
Actually, it’s funny… movie never considers the idea of animals spreading the virus. That line works in the film as a response, but never pays off out of that moment.
Anything like Perfect Sense? I found that to be quite profound. Anyone know if Perfect Sense got US distribution?
OK, not exactly a national crisis, but it must be said, obnoxious and unnecessary for torpid bunny to blurt out the end of COUNTRY STRONG like that. Dave does such a good job with spoilers on this site too. Comments like that should be erased. And it’s not like you even got off some great line. What’s the point? I was gonna watch it and was looking forward to discovering this controversial ending I’ve heard about for myself.
The movie was released like 9 months ago. I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has passed. Also, in True Grit, they get the guy at the end too.
Yeah, I know, that’s the standard response. I think it’s rude and pointless. Just one anonymous opinion. Life goes on…
Actually for me, that’s a spoiler that could actually get me to try the movie since nothing in the ad campaign at the time suggested that the story was going in such a corkscrew direction. Hmm.
And I have to say I disagree on the statue of limitations having passed. You act like the movie’s a decade old. It came out this year. Came out on DVD 6 months ago tops, and is just now showing up on cable, I think.
What do guys think of Marion Cotillard?
She’s beautiful and sexy… but at the end of the day, wouldn’t every guy be happier with Jennifer Morrison when she has blonde hair?
Lex, I would be happier with both.
Mike: MONEYBALL is based on a true story, so it is, in a sense, pre-spoiled.
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