Kubrick Rubric Ratings: So, 'Contagion' was Prophetic, Even if a Little Off Target.

 

Stop me when this sounds familiar: Somewhere in China, a new and deadly disease is formed in the cells of a bat. Somehow the bat's disease finds its way into a Chinese restaurant, where one unlucky and unknowing customer contracts it. She flies home from China to the United States, and interacts with more than a few people and surfaces along the way. Suddenly, we have people with deadly flu-like symptoms in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Over the next few days, the disease spreads to countless others, while some of the first to be symptomatic are professed dead in hospitals around the globe. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is stunned. The World Health Organization is back-peddling to deal with a new crisis that they aren't quite sure is a crisis yet. Despite citizens around the world seeing the news of the virus, they carry on with their everyday lives, going to school, going to work, riding buses, and eating at restaurants. Eventually enough people get sick, enough people die, and the general public realizes there is something seriously, seriously wrong. Grocery stores are raided, children are stuck at home, air, land, and sea borders are closed, and governments around the world issue mask mandates and social distancing guidelines. And while people continue to die at increasing rates, hedge fund managers look to profit off of the virus, online conspiracy theorists incite dissidence, and the hardworking members of public health organizations are demonized. The bereaved don't get the chance to grieve properly, as the virus strips society of healthy human interaction and general peace. All the living know is stress and fear.

Sounds familiar right? Well, that isn't just the script of 2020. That's the script for Steven Soderbergh's 2011 drama Contagion. While much has been written about Contagion and its shocking similarities to the current Covid-19 crisis, much of it was written too early to even fully understand how striking the similarities are, and how deadly the differences might be.

So, to kick off my new Kubrick Rubric series, I've decided to start by addressing the very crisis that inspired the creation of the KRR and review the most rewatched movie of the year: Contagion.

-SPOILERS AHEAD-

Pandemics, like this movie, are about people. They shape how we interact with one another, who we trust to be healthy, who we value most, who we're willing to risk our lives for. If anything, 2020 has taught us that much. And because people are at the very center of pandemics, it seems only right that we start with the people of this movie. And oh boy, are there some good ones.

Contagion sports a cast of Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Bryan Cranston, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hawkes, and Elliott Gould. Besides those ten big name actors, it also has a great "Oh, I know that guy" performance from Ng Chin Han. That's a pretty stacked cast. It's so stacked I bet you didn't even notice the Talented Mr. Ripley reunion of Damon, Paltrow, and Jude Law. Steven Soderbergh has a knack for assembling mega-talented casts together, see Ocean's 11, 12, and 13, and Contagion is no exception.

That being said, almost none of them are given the screen time to really flourish in their roles. They're all quite good, don't get me wrong, but the only one who really puts their foot down on the gas and steals the movie is Kate Winslet. With just the flick of her eyes Winslet is able to grab the concern of the audience, and of all the emotional responses to a deadly outbreak sweeping the globe, hers seems the most genuine.

Great, now I've had half a cup of coffee and have been rewatching Kate Winslet scenes. It's preposterous that she didn't get an Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They just had to give it to Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby, didn't they?! The Academy is so up Clint Eastwood's ass that they forgot Swank had won a few years earlier for Boys Don't Cry and failed to give Winslet an Oscar, AGAIN. Clearly I have a lot of Kate Winslet stock, and I think she should have at least three Oscars by now, but I digress. It's just that Winslet is once of the best actors of this generation, and there's nothing in Contagion that makes me think any differently. Especially in comparison to Matt Damon's performance, which really needs to be talked about.

 

I can't decide if I like this Damon performance or not. On the one hand, his final scene makes my eyes well up. It's very touching and is the only time in the movie I get the sense that he actually loves his wife, the late Gwyneth Paltrow. On the other hand, Damon goes from zero to one hundred when he finds out Paltrow has died. At first, it doesn't even register that she's dead. "Can I go talk to her?" he asks moments after he's told she's died. (Absolutely brilliant script writing, in my opinion.) Then sixty seconds later he's screaming, "She didn't have herpes! What are you talking about!" And it's like, 'Woah okay bud, that came out of no where. You're Matt Damon, not Al Pacino.' Honestly, I think the role is tailored more for Casey Affleck's temperament than Damon's, but it doesn't make-or-break the movie so I don't take too much credit away from the the movie for that.

Where I do take credit away from the movie is Marion Cotillard's character arc. Dr. Leonora Orantes, a representative from the WHO played by Cotillard, spends most of the movie in Hong Kong reviewing restaurant and casino footage featuring Paltrow in an attempt to figure out who exactly was patient zero. Right as she's figuring out the first point of transmission, she's suddenly kidnapped by her Chinese coworker, played by Ng Chin Han, and held hostage until his village receives the first dosages of vaccines. While I have no problem believing the Chinese government would kidnap an international humanitarian, there's a certain unbelievability to the whole situation because: A. The vaccine is hundreds of days away; B. Dr. Orantes has absolutely zero connection to the production of the vaccine, and by taking her hostage it kind of nullifies her entire story line finding patient zero; and C. After she's taken hostage we don't see her again until she's released!! The movie just moves on! We never see the negotiations to get her back, we never see how she lived for hundreds of days, nothing! Nothing at all. It's the only main problem with the plot. And when we do finally see her again, Chin Han is trading her for a case of vaccines. The hand off goes smoothly, and a WHO representative escorts the totally together and not-living-in-a-Chinese-village-for-months looking Cotillard to the airport, where she finds out that the vaccines she was traded for are actually placebos. And how does Dr. Orantes respond to this news? By rushing out of the airport and presumably returning to the Chinese village somehow, although we never see her story arc completed in that sense either. Major plot problems. We just needed to see like fifteen more minutes of that plot arc and everything would have been fine. Instead, the audience is left scratching their heads and wondering what the fuck happened in all that time.

The wonderfully put together Marion Cotillard.

Now, if you're like me and you care about directors and their works, you probably watch Steven Soderbergh movies because they're fun. The aforementioned Ocean's movies are fun. As is Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, and Magic Mike. Contagion is not fun. But that doesn't mean it isn't very, very good. The music is frantic and pulsating, the cinematography is terrific, and the script, while not as catchy as Ocean's 11, is filled with quite a few memorable lines:

• "It's a bad day to be a rhesus monkey."
• "Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."
• "Blogging is not writing. It's graffiti with punctuation."

I really enjoy that last one. Thanks Elliott Gould. 

For the most part the film flows really nicely together. It's tough to nail the balancing act of an ensemble cast with different story arcs, especially when most of the main characters never interact with any of the others, but Contagion is able to do it pretty well. The cut from Jude Law's conspiracy theorist vlogger to Matt Damon searching frantically for his daughter who's snuck out the backdoor doesn't feel harsh, because the feel of both scenes - the worry and doubt and fear - permeates across the storylines. 

That's what Contagion gets so right about a global pandemic. No matter where you are, you're scared. The little coincidences, say a bat being the vector for a new disease, are startling because of their similarities to Covid-19, but they aren't where Contagion gets its bonafides as a truly prescient piece of work. That comes from the feeling it emits. The first half hour feels more akin to documentary than fiction. It's like literally watching the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in real time, and knowing exactly where the world is going to end up. It was probably scarier to watch in 2011, or hell even 12 months ago. Watching it now, after half a year in quarantine, it's just sad. And that makes the film just that much more powerful.

Where the comparison between Contagion and 2020 hurts the film is in the differences, not the similarities. By the second half of the movie, the United States has turned into damn-near anarchy, with most major states operating under martial-law. Banks, businesses, and grocery stores are burned down and looted. Families are killed in their homes. It turns into a dog-eat-dog world. Except, with the hindsight of 2020, we know now that that wouldn't happen. 

It's terrifying to think that society could turn into The Purge, as it so nearly does in this movie, but what's even more terrifying is to think about what actually happened instead: the general population didn't listen. They didn't overreact. They underreacted. People kept eating out. They refused to wear masks. They demanded the reopening of schools and businesses, explicitly at the expense of the population. And sure, while MEV-1, the movie's fictional disease, kills at over 10x the rate of the coronavirus, it's too hard now to believe that if Covid-19 mutated and its mortality rate increased dramatically, that suddenly everyone would react accordingly. They wouldn't. Some people, those fueled by the Donald Trumps and Alex Joneses of the world (of which Jude Law's character is an early prototype), would still refuse to wear a mask and practice social distancing. And that means more people would die.

The scariest part of Contagion, a movie with a disease that threatens to wipe out 20% of the global population, somehow isn't the disease. It's that we're dealing with a much milder disease right now in real life, and handling it much, much worse than Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Ehle, and Kate Winslet did. If Contagion followed the script of 2020, we'd call it unrealistic. We wouldn't buy that so much of the population could die while everyone else turns a blind eye. But that's exactly what happened.

Contagion prophesized the coming of 2020. Only it stayed on track, and somewhere along the way, we went off the rails.

The most iconic shot of Paltrow's career.

Contagion KRR: 8/10