Film Review | Contagion, dir. Steven Soderbergh

From the director of Traffic, The Informant, and the Ocean’s movie trilogy is a movie about the stages of a viral outbreak: contact, disease, and contamination over an area, and the politics of keeping it contained. It is one of the best pandemic/epidemic movies completed to date, and a large percentage of that is from who stars in it. With a cast comprised of reputation like this, from Matt Damon to Jude Law to Kate Winslet to Marion Cottilard, you’d be hard pressed to find actors and actresses that could do a political thriller (in the purest sense) any better, and Soderbergh knows this, almost too much. It centres on the attempts and repercussions felt by people living in a world becoming bent to a rapidly evolving virus, a virus “that’s figuring us out faster than we are [figuring it].” It examines this slightly yellow-tinted world like a fly under a microscope, on a day-to-day approach, showing how quickly it adapts and mutates to an unbelievable scale of destruction, as some try to live in a suspension of normality, some fight to find a cure, and others simply try their best and end up getting infected. It holds that paranoia really well for the entirety of the film – unmarked graves lie in ditches at the side of the roads, peeling orange posters state that the drug depots are hiding an existing cure of MEV-1 (the dubbing of said virus) from the public, and you can hear occasional muffled coughing and screams in the distance- and the disturbing landscape imagery is almost close to an apocalyptic picture. It’s absorbing because you’re left with a sense of ickiness and self-concious even after you leave. You are aware how much you touch your face, wash your hands, cough, and sneeze. And that air of self-conciousness takes a little while to fade. Once again, you’d be hard-pressed to find that kind of lasting feeling from a movie, and indeed, this movie would not go well for people that are mysophobic. For anxiety-encountering people like me, Contagion is not a possibility I want to be visiting in reality anytime soon. View at your own risk.

Unfortunately, what thrills is only half of the film, and that half is partly due to a meticulous script that I found always interesting, and the subtlety of doom that hangs over each exchange. Matt Damon stars as the heartbroken dad who loses his wife (Paltrow) and stepson to the virus and is extra cautious to keep the only thing he has left, his daughter, away from it too. Jude is a freelance whistleblower who, despite being told that “blogging is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation,” jumps on the HEV-1 virus and takes advantage of the opportunity to tell the world about a potential cure. Kate Winslet is Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence officer sent to find out how it started in the States. Marion Cottilard is a member of World Health who flies to China to investigate the earliest possible source of infection: Damon’s wife. There she ends up getting into some trouble with Chinese locals, which is where the script begins to fall apart. Her time on screen is completely underplayed, and it comes to an abrupt end. Some of the characters, without naming names, come and go far too quickly, leaving you to wonder why their storyline was ever shown in the first place. These people, though kept distinctive from a tight script and capable acting, refuse to ever really mesh into cross-section and achieve the link of connectedness that makes movies with multiple POV’s click. The fact that this is a movie of solid science doesn’t make the CSI hyper-speed of eventually finding a miraculous exploit believable at all; in fact, it lowers the believability of scientific inclination from which it takes from.

Here’s some medical babble of sorts that do a better job of the gaps between Contagion‘s reasoning, from readers discussing an article over at WIRED Science (here’s the link, if you’re into that sort of thing.) I call it this:

The Pointing of Medical Hollywood Blunders by Candid Readers

“The scientists solve a crystal structure for a viral protein nearly instantly.  Before being able to culture the virus in fact.  My understanding is that this is no trivial task, takes quite a bit of time, and requires a lot of purified protein, which requires a LOT of virus, which requires growing the virus.

About the growing bit, at one point the same scientist says something along the lines of “We can’t grow it, it kills every cell we try it on.”  I was under the impression that was successful culturing: the virus grows in the cells and bursts them.  Viruses are very picky, I would assume that the problem would be the virus ignoring every cell you put it with.”

(…)

[in response to above comment]

“Those are not quibbles. Those are observations of logic faults from a film apparently boasting the reality of the material. Ultimately, one has to understand that the fictional film utilizes one source (a group heavily bias towards one specific genus of one particular family in a very large order of germs) for scientific support. As such, you have to realize that not only is the advisement skewed, but ultimately at the mercy of creative license at the end of the day.

Your first point is spot on and quite frankly, I found to be hilariously analogous to the “chicken or the egg” blunder. The structural element, depending on an enveloped versus naked virus, requires time in that the optimization and troubleshooting of growing crystals gobbles up a majority of any researchers time. It represents, to some, the holy grail of virus study (next to perhaps definitive receptor identification) as the prelude used in performing single molecule inhibition studies, critical residue mutational studies, antibody design, and a host of other molecular probes. Advances in cryo-electron microscopy further add to the precise nature of culturing any potential protein, but all of these methods are “usually” dependent on prior research isolating and identifying the potential virion from sera through countless genomic, immunologic, and biochemical treatments. Of course, there’s single virus particle imaging along with a host of other nifty fluorescent tricks, but most viruses currently being studied using such kinetic methods have been heavily researched over the decades to understand a considerable amount about their temporal strategies and spatial composition to the extent of cholesterol dependencies. Solving a structure is not the same thing as taking a Polaroid of whatever is smaller than 0.2 um retrieved from a Gweneth Paltrow cerebral sample. Of course, this does not mean a shotgun approach couldn’t be done in a health snafu.

Your second point is perhaps the less obvious of the two though most troubling for anyone in the field. Cellular tropism is a very real thing and not something that can be ignored especially if within the same film it mentions reservoirs and two radically different cell targets. The film goes on to completely ignore the concept of infectious dose presentation, here shown to exist at radically bizarre levels in certain fluids for the sake of fiction. It ignores the distinct differences in susceptibility versus permissibility in virology in terms of an infectious cycle followed by an utter lack of clear understanding in differences and limitations of vertical and lateral transmission routes per virus, rates of mutation, etc. The movie was great nonetheless, just that it shouldn’t tout validity as strongly as they appear, and any lab group associated with advisement should not be as forthcoming to such an association when everyone knows Hollywood will take it and run and do what Hollywood does.”

Contagion is a movie so infectious that it will infect you with the chilling realization that something like this is a realistic scenario, brought close by the unpleasant scare of SARS, H1N1, and the Spanish flu (which it all makes mention to). Something like this could happen, but only most of it. It’s a scenario of medical complexity that, like everything, will never be realistically portrayed in the grounds of Hollywood cinema. And then comes the illuminating final scene, where the viewer is shown the chain of contamination and is told how the world goes round in a moment of pure irony. Though not as good as Traffic, Contagion is a film that’s absorbing because it is grounded in step-by-step political syllogism and scientific fact (and downright disturbing in concussion from it) and skewed because of how easily it comes to a close and refuses to coalesce into getting anywhere, even with its capable cast.