Contagion – The Anatomy of an Epidemic

Contagion hit the screens with an amazing cast of characters. Even with the cast that it sported, I wasn’t sure it was high enough on my list to see during this incredibly busy time of year. One of my friends convinced me otherwise and off we went.

Listed as a thriller, Contagion was pretty much the opposite. Precise, arms-length, the film takes a look at the spread of a pandemic in such a detached manner that it becomes a study of a disease, instead of a thriller about the spread of a disease. There was no sense of urgency; no thrill in the thriller.

Director Steven Soderbergh has created a strangely stilted roadmap of what may happen when the bird flu eventually spreads in a pandemic. Watching the progression of the disease, we learn about the pandemic “knot,” or number of people each patient encounters while they are infectious. To drive home the issue Soderbergh changes his bird flu knot part way through the movie from a two to a four or five, speeding up the spread of the illness around the world.

Even when there are riots, the actors and director keep everything very distant. After the death of his wife, Matt Damon’s character, Mitch Emhoff, keeps his daughter indoors away from possible contamination. As food runs out, they go to the grocery store to try to find something to eat, and people are rioting. He comes face to face with an infected woman and hurries his daughter out of the store and back to the house, but as the story goes on, we don’t learn how he actually finds food for his daughter.

The pandemic spreads. We see horrific numbers of millions of dead. There is one scene of a mass grave, but it’s all very orderly. There are shots of trash in the empty streets, but there aren’t any bodies laying around as there would undoubtedly be.

Jude Law plays a blogging reporter who is harassed by officials. He’s the first person to identify the spread of the disease, but he’s shunned as being only a “blogger.” When he identifies a potentially “natural” cure, he’s threatened with prison, while the doctor working on a vaccine is hailed as a hero as she tries the drug on herself and gets lucky, at least for now.

Contagion is a great film to watch to gain a basic understanding of the way pandemics occur. It’s a great movie for classrooms, with very little objectionable material in it. I don’t rate it high as a thriller, but as a docu-drama it was interesting and informative.