chavel’s review published on Letterboxd:
In 2011, I thought Contagion was very good but had far-fetched question marks only because I didn’t understand then the credibility of an airborne virus, microbes and pathogens, incubation periods, and generally the science of it all which happens to be based on actual science. I had looked at it as a “thriller.” I saw it again this week, and it predicted a lot of things right or to come, and while the science has certain variables compared to contemporary realities, it is head-on. Everything here now serves as an ever-ready relevant and educational wake-up call.
Director Steven Soderbergh has always photographed his own movies under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, and so it’s been easy to sometimes take him for granted for what he does behind the camera. This is one of his best jobs – it’s “The Battle of Algiers” but more vivid and immediate, and like his Oscar-winning “Traffic,” he uses diverse color plates to distinguish different locales. The feverish and emotive colors of the cinematography are stunning, and Soderbergh like a dispassionate Kubrick meets the agitated vérité docudrama of early William Friedkin, nimbly crosscuts between analogue stories.
The actors are all scrupulously drawn with none of them going off the deep end; they pretty much all have a firm grip on their characters: Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, Bryan Cranston, Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gwenyth Paltrow. When the first character falls prey to the bacteria eating disease, the ER doctor labels it as likely encephalitis as reason for demise, as there is no scientific data yet on what will become MEV-1.
Technical aspects and cast aside, Contagion is now such highly anxious viewing. In 2020, with the world in a pandemic scare with Coronavirus classified as COVID-19, we are up in arms over conflicting rumors of origins, reports redacted by local sources while international news often cite clearer reports and theories, even if at times it is disparate information. Was our current problem of COVID-19 manufactured deliberately inside a lab to be a deadlier version of a HIV pathogen to serve as a biological weapon that got out of hand? Or did it originate in open meat markets that came from inside pus and bacteria built up in abscesses from neglected/abused animals at slaughter (perhaps the rare pangolin animal mixing microbes and pathogens and jumping species with pigs or else some other animal)? Or did it come about perhaps in a combination of different diseased animal crossbreeds during street slaughter in the open market while in filthy, abject conditions?
If it is one of the latter origins, it compares frighteningly to Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns’ proposal, that in the sequence genome of the virus, it mutated in origin through the contact of two diseased animals, a “crossover event.”
Ehle’s Dr. Hextall explains early how the virus strain gets trapped and absorbed within the human body:
These [viral attachment protein] receptors are found in the cells of both the respiratory tract and the central nervous system. The virus attaches to the cell like a key slipping into a lock.
Fishburne’s Dr. Cheever of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) responds to this phenomenon with instant awareness:
So we have a novel virus with a mortality rate in the low twenties. No treatment protocol and no vaccine at this time.
In reality, Trump made cuts to the CDC and shut down Global Health Security and Biodefense research in 2018, which had it been intact today would lead the charge with researching, informing, protecting the United States. You look at Contagion, and while the movie spooks, the hope is that we have some people left working on a coronavirus vaccine that are as smart as Dr. Hextall, Dr. Sussman, Dr. Orantes, Dr. Cheever, and Dr. Mears are, the last mentioned who reminds another, “And stop touching your face, Dave.”
Winslet’s Dr. Mears explains how one particular virus can spread faster than the common flu:
For every person who gets sick, how many other people are they likely to infect? So, for seasonal flu, that’s usually about one. Smallpox, on the other hand, it’s over three. Now, before we had a vaccine, polio spread at a rate between four and six. We call that number the “R-Naught.” “R” stands for the reproductive rate of the virus… How fast it multiplies depends on a variety of factors. The incubation period, how long a person is contagious. Sometimes people can be contagious without even having symptoms. We need to know how big the population of people susceptible to the virus might be. Once we know the R-Naught, we’ll be able to get a handle on the scale of the epidemic.
The filmmaking choices and narrative are not without its faults, albeit, minor faults. Law is a blogger pest who engages in securities fraud, pushing a homeopathic drug as a vaccine and says it is the government that doesn’t want to promote an actual cure; in 2011, I thought his character was sketchy and overdrawn, and today, I wish more had been done with his character. Perhaps compare him to another conspiracy hawk that we have today?
Cotillard is an engaging and interesting character who gets stranded in China at some point, and literally gets stranded and forgotten within the narrative. I know she’s in the movie so Soderbergh can make a broad point; sometimes I think the mercurial filmmaker cares to flex his intellect at the expense of abandoning all emotion to his story.
Finally, I am at once dazzled by his narrative showmanship and flummoxed by how Soderbergh ends the film. Once crucial shot is at a pig farm and the camera picks up one piglet who has come in contact with DNA strains from a bat. The pig farm is way too clean and relatively sterile. I can imagine Soderbergh wanting to show the truth of what a real pig farm looks like but the studio bankroll machine tellin’ him, ”You gotta clean it up before you shoot there! We can’t have commercial audiences too disgusted! The truth is we as a people, on a worldwide scale, have been torturing pigs for decades in the cruelty they receive in their raising in metal crates (females in “gestation crates”), resulting in overcrowded pens that fester diseases, large hernias, lacerations and sores from constant metal chafing, growths and warts caused in often never cleaned excrement rot.
I wish Soderbergh, for Contagion and his other films as well, would find a way around the people who censor him to show us more vividly the human and animal rot. I even thought while "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" are among his most captivating and sweeping entertainments, they were not dirty enough.
But yeah, overall the 2011 Contagion smartly is the biggest watch of 2020.