CONTAGION

'Since winning the Palme d’Or (Cannes Film Festival Best Director) in 1989 (‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’) Steven Soderbergh has garnered critical and commercial success with such films as ‘Erin Brockovich’, ‘Traffic’, and the ‘Ocean’s’ series.  However, on the tail end of those films, Soderbergh has seemed to lean towards making the type of films that won him Cannes over twenty years ago; films that rely heavily on emotionally distant realism.

This is not to say we didn’t care about the characters in Soderbergh’s earlier films, or more recently in less box-office friendly, but nonetheless amazing pieces, such as Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience, or Ché (which received a Criterion Collection release).  Rather, Soderbergh dials back his direction to match the experience of real life situations, not glorifying deaths of main characters or boring the audience with back-story to create viewer-character connections.

Case in point, Contagion.  The film follows the emergence of a deadly disease that affects a wide range of the world population.  Soderbergh is intent in diving in head first to the story.  Woman gets sick, comes home, dies, husband in disbelief, husband goes home, son is also dead.  I’m not huge on spoilers in reviews, but this is the first ten minutes.  As I said, you don’t get a chance to relate to the characters let alone learn their names.  What follows is the spread of a disease with no known cure and how it affects the lives of a few specific individuals.  Unfortunately due to the star-studded cast (Jude Law, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Platrow) and the lack of screen time for any one actor, it would be an act of futility to go into each and everyone’s performance (although I would like to applaud Law as the get-rich-off-a-worldwide-epidemic blogger and Damon as the repressed father who lost half his family in the blink of an eye, they had the most lasting impact on me after leaving the theatre).

What really makes the film is Soderbergh’s direction and Scott Z. Burns’ (who recently worked with Soderbergh on ‘Informant!’) razor sharp script.  Soderbergh and Burns create an epidemic that I could see happening in real life, not over amplifying the fear aspect but boiling down the raw details of how a similar situation would actually play out.  Therein lays the terror.  The mood is eerily somber rather than full blown chaos.  Using images of deserted streets and Purell sanitized latex glove wearing doctors instead of cliché riots and looting (although these aspects are present in the film they are to a much lesser degree than other epidemic/pandemic/disaster movies, thus making it more credible) to create a relaxed tension (a contradiction only understood by seeing the film).   The only gripe I can come up with, and now pigeon-holing myself into disaster movie stereotyping, is I was never on the edge of my seat.  Again this is due more to the intentional mood Soderbergh and Burns are setting rather than a real flaw in filmmaking.

In an era that has seen its share of recent disaster/epidemic films, Soderbergh has created a world that not only terrifies us but seems believable at the same time, a feat not conquered often.  For this, Contagion has catapulted itself to the ranks of top disaster/epidemic films in the past decade and should be in the discussion for all-time consideration.

GRADE: A-

OSCAR CHANCES:

Best Picture: Long Shot

Best Director (Soderbergh): Possible

Best Original Screenplay (Burns): Long Shot