Review: 'Contagion' is sensible but also sterile

Film: Contagion (U/A)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Rose McGowan, Laurence Fishburne,
Jude Law, Elliott Gould, Kate Winslet
Rating: ***
 

Beth Emhoff, a businesswoman returning from Hong Kong, unwittingly brings humanity closer to devastation when she contracts a gruesome virus that kills people and multiplies faster than it can be analysed, contained and cured.

The Centre for Disease Control’s Dr Ellis Cheever (Fishburne) and Dr Erin Mears spring into action, tracing the route of the virus, which has turned into a full-fledged pan-continental pandemonium-inducing pandemic.

Beth’s husband Thomas (Damon) -- immune to the virus that spreads through the faintest human contact -- bereaves the loss of his wife and son and grows ferociously protective of his surviving daughter. While Dr Leonora Orantes (Cotillard), a WHO employee, finds herself held hostage in a desperate Chinese village, Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law with bad teeth), a widely renowned blogger, disseminates information reeking with paranoia and unfounded accusations, which threatens to undo the government’s efforts.

The film deals, quite clinically, with its subject, switching from one aspect of the ensuing tumult to the next without unfairly espousing the cause of a particular individual. (Possible spoiler: Nope, Thomas’s immunity, good sense and occasional righteous anger give him the lower finger of the upper hand; an average Joe, he doesn’t hold any key/shot gun that can ensure mankind’s survival)

With its multiple strands, the film, pumping electronic score and all, can be referred to as (It’s Soderbergh here so let’s use a pretentious term) impressionistic with the details behind the people enduring/ battling/having suffered under the virus being scant.

Though we learn that Beth was an adultress, because this aspect of her life has no bearing on the story, it is never explored later.

It’s not like elements of drama are altogether absent (Thomas sheds more than a few tears), but with the film’s realism comes a sense of sterility which is also the result of the aforementioned minimalistic character development. Apart from this economy, the film covers all its bases.

As with other films of its ilk, Contagion, while crisscrossing from one character to another, shows the lofty heights of nobility and the savage lows that individuals can soar/stoop to when circumstances are such that their survival (and that of their loved ones) becomes an immediate self-interest. And then the bit about Krumwiede, the new media hack whose disinformation adds a new layer of frightfulness to the scenario, was inspired. Shame he wasn’t used enough.

Contagion’s non-clichéd, unpredictable nature and strong performances are among its stronger points. The film, a marriage of documentary (no, not the Cloverfield kind) and hyperlinked drama, respects your intelligence. It’s educational even, with facts and jargon constantly being sprouted and the chill factor arising not from incessant gore peddling but from the plausibility of an actual outbreak of some strange unheard of disease casting its shadow on every living thing and reducing megalopolises to cenotaphs. If this isn’t savory to the connoisseurs of the brain-eating zombie sub-genre, it is advisable that they skip Contagion.