I like thoughtful documentaries, and I like mindless blockbusters – especially on a Friday night. I had expected the latter with the new film Contagion. But in fact it was a mushy mashup of both.
End of the world is a fixed theme in today’s culture. Maybe we’re working out in fiction the repressed angst of the eternal war on terror. Or maybe we’re just escaping everything in the real world. (If I’m one of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, I won’t have to go to work. Ever. Again.)
Steven Soderbergh deliberately avoids a blockbuster disaster flick. He tries – at least to my uninformed eye – to show what a global pandemic might really look like. An unglamorous looking Kate Winslet (how is that even possible?) walks around with a notepad diligently jotting down observations. A dull-as-dirt Marion Cotillard trudges through hundreds of hours of security-cam video trying to discover Patient Zero. Computers don’t make blingy, bleepy sounds like on CSI.
I appreciate the straight-up approach. But instead or cinema verite, it becomes cinema ennui. Not only was it duller than a blockbuster action flick, it was duller than real life.
If tens of millions of people die, that has to be dramatic, right? Not when you only hear the numbers on the fictional news reports or in monotone briefings at the fictionalized CDC. Where are the whirling vistas of mass death and the poignant close-up of a mother crying over a dying child, or vice versa?
A man loses half his family in one day and barely reacts to it. And a very good actor plays the role. (Don’t want to name names and be the spoiler.) Even his tearful breakdown later in the movie is barely noticeable.
There are the expected scenes of National Guard quarantines, but without even the satisfying whirr of helicopter blades and kathunk of tank tracks that make use of the theater’s honkin’ sound system. That’s not being overly dramatic. If the tanks rolled into your town, you’d hear them.
There are also the masses of looters, but they virtually glide by. We know from the London footage that the real thing is far more menacing.
In short, it’s neither emotional nor scary. It’s not sensationalist to put those elements into a serious movie. If your family were dying, your town were burning, and the biggest plague in history were sweeping across the planet, the experience would be emotional and scary.
Contagion perhaps most resembles a documentary of an event that never happened. But it doesn’t even have a little Ken Burns flair.
