Contagion

The most recent natural disaster that we have had in real life is the tsunami and the subsequent nuclear disaster happened in Japan in 2011. We cannot yet safely weight what impact all this had not only in the Japanese economy and its society but around the world too.

The idea that everything and everyone is connected is more than obvious in a fully globalized society. We were not surprised to see the telecasted debacle suffered by our distant neighbors. The surprise was a different one: the Japanese people were orderly waiting in straight and long lines to get some groceries at the supermarkets; they did not express their grief in public and they never gave an image of international chaos or weakness.

Contagion is told from a scientific point of view, not so much from an artistic one; a feature that builds up Soderbergh’s  innovative point of view in this  film, which is necessary, recurrent and extremely interesting.

Looking at Soderbergh’s filmography, we would find films of all genres. Soderbergh is more an explorer of the film industry that an author and this has been demonstrated by his frequent mistakes, both in commercial movies and the ones anchored at more alternative parameters. But Soderbergh's work cannot be divided into two homogeneous blocks: there is a constant transfer between the recognizable and the experimental, so that even his low-budget films fit into the so-called “Sundance” movies category and his best known works are blockbusters.

Definitely Soderbergh has always tended to focus on the thesis, he is more interested in the processes that trigger and connect events than on the events themselves, something that goes totally against the entire American film industry, not just the blockbusters. Check out “Ocean's eleven” as an example:  the robbery perpetuated by Clooney’s gang did not matter nearly as much as the preparation of the assault and the interaction among the thieves getting ready the perfect robbery. “Erin Bronkovich” is the story of a personal investigation in search of the justice of a few ones. In “Traffic”, he uses the technique of the crossed stories found in “Contagion”, but in “Traffic” it is used more as way to talk about patterns of the American society than to criticize it.

“Contagion” does not intend to be partial or subjective or emotional and is not afraid to be cold, distant, and totally different from the rest of the productions of our time. It is primarily a film about globalization, about a virus that affects us worldwide, a story about human frailty over a catastrophic situation.

Contagion is a film of ideas that will surprise those who expect another run off the mill show. It tests and gives a twist to our position as spectators, used to and raised to an American way to interpret and rationalize stories from the beginning till the end.

Soderbergh is most of the time committed to mix up the terror thrillers and social dramas, but the foundations of "Contagion" relies in the relationships between the pieces of the puzzle, not the autonomy of each story as its own. “Contagion” must be seen as a mosaic, not as fragments of the same picture of the disaster. Only in this way the tissue that form the different characters (a blogger, a scientist, a nurse, a desperate parent, ...) gest to have all the sense in the world.

Something unexpected is that the main characters are played by some very big names (like Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon and Lawrence Fishburne) and yet, none of them is more important than the story; none of them has a major role; none of them is more important than the final scene of this film. In this scene, Soderbergh reveals how the infection started: this demonstrate his interest in academic research and his total rejection of classic Hollywood plot structure. “Contagion” ends up 'with that, that is relevant', with the findings and results of the field, the resolution of the case. What matters is the first death, not the ramifications of the scheme: the rest is another story.

In the end, it all comes down to one distinction: between a pre-fabricated film and a more natural one (handcrafted, if you want to name it). "Contagion" belongs to the second group.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: Scott Z. Burns

Stars: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law