Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

 

If Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is any kind of tour de force, the viewer may assess it primarily as one of research and organization rather than of artistic imagination, and yet it holds up remarkably well when viewed with the hindsight knowledge of how our subsequent real-world pandemic played out. In particular, the social media agitator played by Jude Law, who seemed rather shoehorned into the film at the time, snappily foresees a future deluge of false information, of supposed miracle cures pushed by financial self-interest; the character’s remark about not knowing that the vaccine won’t cause autism in ten years eerily anticipating a whole administration’s worth of regression. Inevitably, Soderbergh’s choice to survey such a wide landscape within an almost overly concise running time involves much elision: for example, we see Matt Damon’s everyman character lining up in a food line which turns violent when supplies run out, and apparently witnessing a shooting in a nearby house, but we never gain a broader sense of the scale of economic and social chaos (which we understand to be considerable, the cited infection and mortality rates being much worse than those of Covid), and at the end normality seems to have reasserted itself with improbable ease. And the use of so many stars (including no less than three best actress Oscar winners) in small roles can be an impediment to sinking into the narrative, giving the project the feel instead of a displaced, quasi-celebratory caper movie. Soderbergh chooses to end the otherwise linear chronicle by circling back to the start, to track the virus’s (in this case entirely natural) origins; by then the information’s importance seems supplanted by what we know of the subsequent global upheaval, and yet it’s a pointed reminder of the inherent fallibility of global supply chains and infrastructure (and that’s without even getting into the lab leak theories).