Contagion

Warner Bros.

If Mother Nature was one of those super villains who long to destroy the world, she might unleash a flu bug like the one that terrorizes humanity in Contagion. It’s a bat virus that hops onto a human host with deadly consequences; the hapless first victim has no natural immunity to the disease, but a remarkable ability to pass it on to other humans, who are equally good carriers, and we are off and running with a pandemic as horrifying as the Black Plague. Worse, because in the fourteenth century there were no packed airliners giving the virus efficient, free rides around the world.

The first patient, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), is a corporate executive who picks up the bug on a business trip to Hong Kong, and unwittingly spreads it through casinos and restaurants and bars and airports as she travels back home to Minneapolis. There’s a subtle cleverness to the way director Stephen Soderbergh shows how easily transmission is accomplished: we see Beth at an airport bar, waiting for a connecting flight; she fiddles with her glass, her hand toys with some nuts in a little bowl. She chats on a cell phone with a lover she has just left while she hands off her credit card to the bartender, who then taps information onto a grimy touch screen. All these ordinary little events feel ominous, even though Beth shows no sign of illness. Once she gets home, though, her health declines so rapidly that all the doctors treating her are completely baffled, and then more people get sick, and the movie pulls away from that story and takes us to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the World Health Organization in Switzerland, where we start to follow the progress of the epidemic through the clinical eyes of scientists trying desperately to stop it.

This is a cracking good thriller, but it’s cold hearted; we are engaged by the mystery of the virus but we never care much about the characters who are affected by it. It’s almost like turning on the nightly news. But, it’s a pretty scary news show, watching scientists desperately try to piece together the viral puzzle while the world descends into anarchy around them. And it’s hard not feel a cold sinking feeling when, during a press conference, the best minds of the CDC keep saying, “We don’t know.”

But that’s the point here, this film is intended to scare us, Soderbergh makes sure of it, allowing the camera to linger on every surface a sick person touches, showing unknown hands clearing cans of food off a grocery store shelf, leaving us to wonder when or if it will ever get restocked. He’s attracted a host of fine actors, and they all do good work even though most of them have little screen time and not much character to develop. Matt Damon turns in a heartfelt performance as Beth Emhoff’s husband, trying to understand what has happened to his wife (“I was just talking to her!”) while he desperately fights to protect the rest of his family from the plague that somehow entered his house. Kate Winslet is also very affecting as the CDC doctor/researcher who goes to Minneapolis to assess the scope of the epidemic and attempt to control it. And, in a nod to viral communication, Jude Law plays a blogging conspiracy theorist who gets millions of hits when he announces that there is a simple herbal remedy for the disease. But the star of the show is the virus, that’s what we’re there to watch, and it never loses our attention. Playing everywhere, won the box office during a pretty slow movie going weekend. B