I must admit I'd avoided revisiting Steven Soderbergh's fantastic 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion once the pandemic broke out. In part because it felt like a trendy thing to do -- and I usually avoid stuff like that -- but I also feared that it would be torturous to sit through, since the fiction it created in some ways was playing out in real time.
This weekend, I finally got over myself and gave it another look and I must say it should go down as one of the great films of the previous decade. It was a well-regarded, solid hit when it came out -- but I don't think it was appreciated enough for its scope and wit -- like so many Soderbergh movies, it was almost a victim of its own sleekness and sophistication.
While the disease portrayed in the movie is far more deadly than the coronavirus -- the movie still does strike a chord on several fronts: especially the bureaucratic resistance to sounding the alarm early and the willingness of people to capitalize on the paranoia these kinds of disasters can inspire.
The latter thread -- which we are very much living with today thanks to the president's narcissistic and profit-driven motivations -- is particularly prescient. It comes in the form of a story line featuring Jude Law, as an obnoxious online blogger whose pushes a miracle cure with little evidence.
He proves to be wildly successful in his efforts -- and I couldn't help but think how wild it is that we have a president doing that instead of a conniving huckster. The film also elegantly shows how easily we can transmit an airborne virus -- the presence of masks early and often in the film is yet another indictment of the timeline we're currently living in.
The various plot threads feel utterly realistic -- and although there are pangs of pathos, particularly in a storyline involving Matt Damon as a suddenly widowed man fending for his kids -- it's never histrionic or overly sentimental. Soderbergh wisely cast stars which immediately gets an audience invested, but there are no big star turns here, every character serves a function to keep the propulsive narrative moving.
In other words, the movie is never boring -- despite what could be a dry subject matter -- and no precious time is wasting on manufacturing emotional moments that don't need to be there. It makes moments -- like when chaos and looting breaks out when there starts to be food and medicine shortages (perhaps the most frightening aspects of the film) it almost feels documentarian in its style and substance.
I remember hearing recently that writer-director Adam McKay has been looking to find ways to dramatize the urgency of climate change with products that will get a wide commercial audience -- to me, Contagion seems like the blueprint.
It doesn't dumb itself down and like I said it doesn't invent some hokey subplot to tug at our heartstrings.
The potential effects of climate change -- if portrayed realistically -- are scary and dramatic enough to be both riveting and revolting, and we've seen how much movies can be an influential game-changer.
Sadly, we didn't heed the warnings of Contagion -- perhaps a global crisis like the coronavirus seemed just too unthinkable at the time. It's true that in the past responsible leadership (think Ebola) prevented super-spreading in this country in the past and who could ever have predicted a president as wantonly irresponsible as Donald Trump.
I guess The Dead Zone sort of did, huh?
The point is I'd like to see more timely, topical thrillers like Contagion, if they're half as sensational they'd still be worthy of seeing.
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