Pandemic movies are truly all the rage right now. Yesterday, I wrote about my experience rewatching Outbreak, and as my time in isolation continued, I decided to rewatch Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant 2011 film Contagion, which I hadn’t seen since it was in theaters.
While Outbreak is a film that feels totally divorced from reality, Contagion feels terrifyingly accurate, especially now that we are living through our own outbreak. We can see where the human and governmental responses feel appropriate and where our real responses are woefully lacking.
Contagion opens as Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) is on a layover in Chicago, en route home to Minneapolis from Hong Kong where she was on a business trip. She is pasty and damp, on the phone with a man she slept with on her layover (we’ll learn later this is her ex). She’s eating nuts from a bowl at the airport bar, coughing without covering her mouth. A title comes up onscreen declaring simply: “DAY 2.”
What follows next is some of the finest filmmaking of Soderbergh’s career: We see a montage of the first few people infected going about their lives: a woman working in London, a man on a bus in Tokyo. Beth feeling sick at home.
What makes the montage so striking is the way Soderbergh focuses subtly on the things we touch. A binder, a pole on the bus, the bowl of nuts in the bar. They are not extreme close-ups or anything particularly ostentatious; the eye is brought to each item with simple suggestion within the frame.
For 30 years now, Soderbergh’s career has been marked by his films’ technical rigor, both in terms of innovation (using digital cameras before it was standard and creating content for apps) and precision (in league with Martin Scorsese and David Fincher as the smoothest users of music in the history of American cinema).
Contagion, in many ways, is the high point of Soderbergh’s career, employing all the tools he had developed over the years.
Within two days, Beth’s “cold” leads her to have a seizure, and she dies in the hospital later that day. Her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), is in total shock. Beth’s son, Clark, has also caught the illness (and most certainly infected classmates), and by the time Mitch returns home from the hospital, Clark is also dead.
Mitch is put into isolation while the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Homeland Security, and the World Health Organization mobilize into action.
Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is on the ground in Minneapolis gathering information, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is in Atlanta at CDC headquarters dealing with government bureaucracy and advising Dr. Ally Hextal (Jennifer Ehle) as she does the lab research on this mystery virus, and WHO epidemiologist Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) travels to Hong Kong to investigate the disease’s origins.
The film covers all of these moving stories in addition to following conspiracy journalist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) as he blogs and posts videos that terrify the masses. The fabric of society begins to crumble, and the virus takes millions of lives over months before a vaccine is found.
Watching Contagion in the time of our current novel coronavirus is scary, to say the least, but it is helpful to see what is essentially the worst-case scenario. What happens in the film is unlikely to happen with the current pandemic (I had to keep reminding myself) because the death rate in the film is believed to be close to 30%, while COVID-19 has a death rate of 2%.
Still, 2% is high enough for the world’s most educated health scientists to sound the alarms, so one can imagine what 30% would look like in the real world.
It is worth noting that Contagion is an Obama-era film, in which the government’s emergency response capabilities are swift and competent. One gets the feeling watching Contagion that the government and the world’s scientific communities came together and got the crisis under control as quickly as humanly possible with minimal mistakes.
There are still mistakes, of course. Dr. Cheever comes under fire for warning his wife to leave Chicago hours before the official announcement that the city would be locked down came over the airwaves, incurring cries of corruption.
If Contagion were a Trump-era film, one imagines that the government would be controlled by a character more like Krumwiede. He whips up mass hysteria, and he fakes his own illness and recovery using a homeopathic drug called Forsythia made by a company in which he has a financial stake.He uses his platform to boost the numbers so he is able to personally profit.
The parade of CEOs at one of President Trump’s earliest press conference and his desire to have everything back to normal by Easter leads us to believe he has had more conversations about how to profit from the pandemic than solving it quickly and ethically.
What makes Contagion so frightening is the sense of time it takes to solve. Dr. Hextal and her team are working around the clock to find a cure, but it can only happen through heads-down diligence and hard work every day.
The film takes us from public pandemonium to a calm resignation of the general population. The disease becomes part of the regular fabric of life before they are able to move on.
Scientists have long warned that a pandemic like this is possible, perhaps inevitable, but COVID-19 is not the doomsday scenario envisioned in Contagion. We can be thankful for that. The biggest chill the movie sends through your spine in 2020 is that we may be totally unprepared if that day should ever actually come. And what would happen then?
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