Going viral

Few movies make you peer around suspiciously whenever someone in the audience starts coughing or sneezing in your midst. Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller, does just that. You’ll be reaching for the Alcogel in no time.

The first 40 minutes or so of Contagion (which I saw at SM Mall of Asia’s IMAX) are probably the scariest you’ll see this year in cinema. It’s as though Soderbergh, whose initials match those of another director named Steven (Spielberg), has taken the lessons of Jaws to heart, and is now ready to give American audiences — a few days before remembering 9/11 — a serious psychic jolt. Instead of making them afraid to go in the water, as Spielberg did in the summer of ’75, Contagion makes us afraid to drink the water, or hold the water glass, or touch a doorknob, or a staircase railing, or even our own faces.

Lady luck: Gwyneth Paltrow blows on an unlucky gambler’s dice in Macau.

“The average person touches his or her face two or three thousand times a day,” remarks Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), and all it takes is one eye-rub to relocate the virus from the source to one’s bloodstream. Set in the present day, Scott Z. Burns’ panicky script imagines what would happen if a mutant virus spread from livestock to humans and quickly spiraled out of control, slaying millions worldwide before a vaccine could be mustered. It’s what happens when, somewhere in the world, “the wrong bat bites the wrong pig.” And it brings back the true horror implicit in the phrase “going viral.”

Soderbergh also marshals a star-studded cast, including prominent names like Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard and Jude Law, but also fills out the movie with his usual interesting character actors (British actress Jennifer Ehle as a Centers for Disease Control scientist; John Hawkes; Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston) — only to wipe out a large proportion of them with the deadly virus. Talk about playing God.

The main vector of the story is Hong Kong, where businesswoman Beth Emhoff (Paltrow) unwittingly becomes Patient Zero, spreading the virus across the globe on an international flight. (We only learn in the final minutes of Contagion where the virus actually originated.) When she returns to Minneapolis, her husband Thomas (Damon) watches in horror as Beth’s jet lag symptoms turn into something much, much worse in the blink of an eye. Like Soderbergh’s earlier Traffic, this film tracks a half-dozen interweaving story lines, as CDC Deputy Director Elis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) sends Dr. Mears out to the field to gather info on Beth’s condition. On the sidelines is smarmy blogger Dr. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) who uses the power of the Internet — much as a virus spreads among its hosts — to sow doubt and paranoia about the government’s intentions as the contagion spreads.

Knocking on heaven’s door: Matt Damon is quarantined in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion.

There is something slightly eyebrow-raising about Soderbergh’s releasing his film on Sept. 9, a mere two days before American would remember its worst crisis in recent memory, the terrorist attack on New York and Washington 10 years ago. Was Soderbergh somehow cashing in on the sober date, or was it the studios? Surely, history has shown that Americans reacted to 9/11 in a more positive way than the spectacle of people madly scrambling for vaccinations and food supplies in Contagion. But, as they like to say in Hollywood, that’s entertainment.

And again, you can’t help being reminded of that other Steven who inflicted Jaws upon an unsuspecting public in the traditional season of families flocking to beaches. Timing is everything, and there will always be an element of P.T. Barnum in the movie business.

Soderbergh even name-checks Jaws in the scene where Dr. Mears explains how the virus spreads exponentially, speaking before dubious Minneapolis city council members who seem unwilling to shut down the malls on “the busiest shopping weekend of the year” (presumably Labor Day). Just like the people of Amity Island pooh-poohing Sheriff Brody’s shark fears right before the July 4 weekend.

Soderbergh says he brainstormed the idea with writer Burns when they were traveling to locations during the making of The Informant! They noticed people got sick a lot while flying, and the idea grew… and grew. As he did with Traffic, Soderbergh got a lot of research info from the US government, including the CDC, which imagines a “tipping point” at which the fabric of society completely breaks down, leading to rioting and looting. Scary stuff.

Kate Winslet (Dr. Mears) tracks down Patient Zero in Minneapolis.

But it’s safer to view Contagion not as our worst real-life fears being realized onscreen, but as an escapist horror movie that is meant to expunge our fears through cinematic catharsis. Yes, the opening is gripping, feverish, chilling; it’s as much a horror movie as any torture flick in recent memory; then it shifts to grim mode, as Soderbergh employs the same sort of gray postproduction tones he used in Traffic to convey a loss of hope.

Certain images linger: Jude Law, stalking empty, littered streets in his biohazard suit after the plague hits, self-righteously hoarding his supply of forsythia; Paltrow’s death-haunted face as she comes to understand her plight; Soderbergh’s beloved freeze-frame device highlighting casual transmission in a Macau casino.

Key to the horror is Winslet’s explanation of the “R0” (“reproductive nought”) factor: this means the number of people infected is a factor of the RO, so if it’s an RO-2 virus, two people die on the first day, four on the second, 16 on the third, 256 on the fourth, 65,536 on the fifth, and by Day Six, 42.9 million people are dead. Math can be so scary sometimes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if China or Hong Kong governments cried foul (fowl?) at their corner of the world once again being depicted as the deadly flu capital of the world, but past avian flu scares have borne out this possibility. Contagion lays out a few other scary facts, such as the virus’s capacity to mutate quicker than vaccination scientists can keep up, and the need to hold vaccination lotteries to distribute cures “fairly” based on date of birth and avoid worldwide anarchy.

Start spreading the news: Blogger Jude Law sows doubt and panic in Contagion.

Soderbergh himself reminds us of a few other words that begin with the letter “S.” Schizophrenic, for example. After all, this is a guy who can jump from gritty realism like Traffic to Ocean’s Eleven without missing a beat. He can score Oscars with populist fare like Erin Brockovich, then do indie stuff like Full Frontal or The Girlfriend Experience. Another “S” word that comes to mind: sadistic. At times, Contagion plunges the audience into a vision with little hope for humanity, and you can almost feel the winches and gears being operated: you know you’re being manipulated, but like Spielberg, Soderbergh is a veritable master at poking our emotions. The gross-out factor is also high, as doomed patients froth at the mouth, cough violently, fall into seizures and hemorrhages. It’s grisly, visceral, and one recalls how Spielberg was accused of “exploiting” the violence of the Holocaust for cinematic ends in Schindler’s List. Or maybe he’s just a great filmmaker.