In Review: Contagion

Contagion, Steven Sodebergh, 2011.

The Gist

Gripping, fast-paced, and told very matter-of-factly, Contagion is a social commentary hiding behind the guise of a movie with a powerhouse cast mostly gone underutilized, but mostly for good.

The Good

• good editing
• gripping and emotional amid the manner of delivery
• good acting by the cast amid little screen time for some

The Bad

• seriously underused Gwyneth Paltrow and Marion Cotillard
• Wahlberg's parts could use a little less expansion, Jude Law needed to be hated more
• too wide-scale a plot, could have used a little focus

Synopsis

Beth Emhoff (Paltrow), an executive of a multinational corporation, is on a business trip in Hong Kong for an opening of their new factory. Upon getting back to America, Emhoff showed signs of sickness and died that night after a short seizure. Soon her son displayed the same symptoms and died. Her husband, Mitch (Wahlberg) was sent to quarantine as news of an outbreak of the disease similar to his wife spread on the news like fire. Meanwhile, blogger Alan Krumwiede who tracked this disease on his blog as early as the first casualty in Hong Kong, Japan, and UK, has been approached by a pharmaceutical company to promote their drug Forsythia to his 2 million unique visitors for $4.4M. As the CDC--lead by Dr. Cheever (Fishbourne) and his team: Dr. Mears on the field (Winslet) and Dr. Hextall on the lab--and the WHO (shown to be represented by Dr. Orantes played by Cotillard) race to find a cure, society as we know it collapses, with the government unable to do anything but to mum the news and keep the panic levels down. 

It's Not a Small World After All

The synopsis I've written for this review is quite long because mostly for good, the movie is expansive and tackles several plots on how social structures respond to such cases of a deadly and contagious epidemic: Fishbourne's POV shows the government, Winslet's shows the medical workers, Wahlberg's shows the family, Cotillard's the international organizations, and Law's the media. Each of those are well-written and are, more often than not, not directly touching the other plots. Compare it to watching The Game of Thrones were there is no central characters, but instead several POV characters for you to root for. The bad thing, some of the characters feel like they can use more screentime, like, hey, Cotillard and Paltrow appeared for only 20 minutes of the movie combined. Seriously, they could've hired someone cheaper and wouldn't have made any difference. I also wanted to hate Jude Law very very much, but I couldn't. He is really evil, but they only showed a little bit. Surprisingly, it still worked. I also felt that Wahlberg's part was too much focused on in the movie--his parts were the more boring ones compared to the others. Some things can really be improved upon this movie, but it was so finely made, a tiny error in changing it could make the whole thing crumble like the society depicted in the movie.

Society Tumbles and Capitalists Win

Honestly, the movie felt more of a drama for me than a thriller as it was advertised. The great thing about it is that the drama works. It's not so forced that you would smell its fraudulence. The narrative also felt like reading a book where some details are left out or considered "already known" by deduction or common sense or details shown /  briefly mentioned en passant. For instance, Cotillard develops a Stockholm syndrome in the movie but the process as to how she got it is no longer explained; Sodebergh also avoided explicitly telling the audience that she has.

I like the pacing of the movie; it felt just right. When some parts are about to get boring (yes, I often wished we skip Wahlberg's parts), Sodebergh allows the film to shift and tell another story, relevant or not to the previous one it skipped. And it actually worked, probably because they are all dealing with the same villain, the disease, but are struggling from its different effects on their lives.

The narrative is very very dry--almost feels like watching a news cast on primetime, but the acting behind it pushes it far from the drab fest it ought to have become. If this is an organism, the narrative is the brain and the acting is the heart. Great performances, especially from Ehle, Wahlberg, and Winslet. I think that is what actually got me, Sodebergh presents everything in dry narrative and when you least expect it, BAM! There goes the tearjerkers, there goes the emotion, there goes humanity unraveling on each of the supposedly dry puppets. And it's all so sudden, it makes your eyes wet and your hearts clenched and it's kept there until there's nothing more to feel.

Cinematography is also good. I have to commend how with mere pictures, some things are explained and some sufferings are brought forward. How Sodebergh shows human sufferings in such short glimpses! It can be really sad, this movie, and for all the suspense and powerhouse screen time that it promises and does not deliver, you can forgive it just by how good the depictions are.

I could add that I was not completely satisfied with some depictions like in Jude Law's parts where he fools the whole of UK and a mere glimpse of the sufferer's POV there is only shown. He also suffers. He sees a friend die who was hoping on the cure he promised, and some more focus on that friend could have made it a bit more human, Law's side. But still wouldn't mind if that wasn't done.

Looking back, yeah, it's supposed to serve pizza, yet you get ice cream, but you won't mind. It's good ice cream.

My verdict:

A passing and recommended mark of 4.25/5.