According to script

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This article was published 08/02/2020 (2247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We need to wash our hands. A lot.

That’s my first takeaway from rewatching Contagion, the 2011 Steven Soderbergh flick about a deadly virus that becomes a worldwide pandemic. (I checked it out after receiving an email suggestion from my good friends at Netflix. It’s also available to stream on Starz or rent on YouTube, and it’s currently hitting the top 15 list on iTunes.)

Contagion has made a recent coronavirus-boosted comeback, which isn’t as silly or shallow as it seems. While functioning as an effective thriller, the film’s underlying message — that disinformation is also a virus — is even more crucial now than it was nine years ago.

Movies are never the best place to get health facts. If you really need hard data on novel coronavirus (2019 nCoV), there’s Health Canada, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, all of which offer less entertaining but more comprehensive information.

Still, films have always offered an outlet for social fears, a way of whistling in the dark. Cinema lets us probe our terrors and process our anxieties, pressing worst-case scenarios into an hour or two of tension and then offering temporary closure.

Contagion is worth a watch, first off, because it’s a good movie, in its own chilly, distant, Soderberghian way. Scripter Scott Z. Burns did extensive research, and it shows. Soderbergh keeps the action swift and urgent, handling a strong ensemble cast and multiple plotlines with taut, terse control. The story starts with Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), who comes back to Minneapolis from a Hong Kong business trip with what seems like a bad case of jet lag but is soon revealed to be a highly contagious fatal virus called MEV-1.

Beyond its cinematic value, Contagion’s issues and ideas have held up. In some ways, the film has gotten even more relevant, the strategic deployment of Paltrow as patient zero, for example, taking on added layers of value. Seeing Paltrow, normally such a Goop-y paragon of glowing skin and sleek hair, reduced to a sweaty, blotchy, clammy mess produces an undeniable shock.

Matt Damon plays Beth’s husband, and his initial inability to take in her sudden death — this isn’t really a spoiler, as it happens within the story’s first few minutes — reflects a larger social assumption that young, healthy, vitamin-enriched, Pilates-practising upper-middle-class North Americans don’t just die from flu-like viruses. Except of course they do, sometimes, and Paltrow’s current role as an exemplar of wellness underlines that.

There are images in Contagion that in 2020 seem to possess an eerie prescience, paralleling the press photos now coming out of Wuhan, China: vast hangar-like structures with rows of camp beds, deserted malls and empty streets, masked health workers pushing stretchers.

Soderbergh and Burns aren’t just fearmongering, though. The film pulls off a tricky balance of creeping fear and crisp rationality.

The camera lingers with unsettling intent on ordinary things — a dish of peanuts at a bar, an elevator button, a subway strap, the door handle at a school — all touched by an infected person. Soderbergh raises the terror level by counting off the days onscreen and announcing cities and their population levels as the disease makes it inexorable advance. Contagion understands that pandemic diseases, in our close and connected world, are a global issue, so the story touches down in London, Geneva, Tokyo, a small village in Guangdong province, Chicago, Atlanta, the Wisconsin border.

The menace of the spreading virus is offset with scenes of determined scientists (including Jennifer Ehle, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Marion Cotillard) fighting to contain and cure it. There’s lots of high-tech stuff going on in Level 4 labs, but there’s also old-school, low-tech public health advice. Winslet’s character, pragmatic and plain-speaking, keeps telling people to wash their hands and stop touching their faces all the time.

The movie also explores the ways in which health issues have social, political and economic implications, tracking the breakdown of civil society under stress. As the disease rages on, authorities wrestle with practical and ethical questions. The CDC is committed to “equal care for all,” but if a vaccine is manufactured, who gets it first? And who decides?

Most importantly, Contagion deals with the dangers of disinformation and panic. “To get sick, you have to be in contact with a sick person or something they touched,” says one researcher. “To get scared, you just have to come into contact with a rumour.”

As the unsavoury embodiment of rumour, a snaggle-toothed Jude Law plays an Alex Jones-type blogger who rails against Big Pharma conspiracies and puts words like “evidence” and “vaccines” in scare quotes.

Science has a chance of inoculating against the ravages of MEV-1, the film optimistically suggests. It can’t do much against a paranoid blogger with 12 million followers. In an age when conspiracy theories thrive, expertise is questioned and scientific knowledge is under attack, that’s a message that resonates today even more than it did in 2011.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca