If you view Contagion purely as a thriller, and not as an in-depth socio-political commentary, then it serves as solid entertainment. It's tense, well-acted and the story doesn't stray too far from credibility. Although its subject matter is serious, this is not a “serious film,†because it mostly operates within the confines of a glossy Hollywood production that's keener on showing off its cast and bowing down to contrived sentimentalism and traditional thriller tactics than deconstructing what it's really about. It functions more like an engaging page-turn than an analytical study on a world health crisis. These aren't necessarily bad things, and we mostly eat them up, but it might be wrong to think we should see Contagion as anything more than simple escapism.
It's fitting the director is Steven Soderbergh, who specializes in stories about disparate characters all linked by a common narrative thread. This one is about a deadly virus outbreak that starts in one city and spreads across the entire world in less than half a year. It begins on “Day 2,†when a traveling marketing manager, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), takes a call from her extra-marital lover in Chicago. She's just cheated on her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), and is about to head home to Minneapolis to see him and her son. At an airport bar, she coughs, shows feverish symptoms and a couple days later succumbs to a fatal seizure. There are other cases like her, including ones in Japan, from where Beth has just returned; London; and China.
Officials at the Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization aren't sure what to make of the novel disease, including Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and the doctor he hires to investigate and manage the situation, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet). There's also an epidemiologist, Dr. Leonara Orantes (Marion Cotillard), researching everything and everyone Emhoff came into contact with so she can determine its cause. She concludes, as does Mears, that the virus is spread by touching, and Soderbergh doesn't skimp on shots of everything we touch on a daily basis - cell phones; elevator buttons; credits cards; drinking glasses; and especially our own faces, which, according to Mears, we touch two or three thousand times a day. Seeing these images made me want to wash my hands and never touch anything again, which is one of the ways the movie creates an effective state of unease.
On the political side of the spectrum is a free-lance writer from San Francisco, Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law). He's one of those left-wing, bike-riding bloggers who vehemently speaks out against (and believes in) things like corporate malfeasance and government conspiracy. When the disease sets in and becomes a reality, he's convinced the CDC and WHO are in bed with pharmaceutical companies and deliberately wait on distributing a cure until assured profits can be made. As more people die, his views add widespread panic to the ensuing violence and chaos as the grim realities of a dog-eat-dog world begin to show their ugly heads.
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