4 gibbles outta 5

Director: Steve Soderbergh

I remember Outbreak.  It was one of the first bundle of R-rated movies that I saw not-secretly.  I thought it was good, maybe because it was rated R, and I made sure to tell my parents it was good because I was mature enough to watch R-rated movies.  As has seemed to happen to me, now, on several occasions, time passed.  I never saw Outbreak after that initial R stint, but looking back upon it in my general movie-watching haze, it was pretty lite fare, and predictable, and etc, and etc, but most of all: it was set up like the big budget film that it was.

I kept thinking about how lame Outbreak seemed in comparison to ‘Contagion’ as I watched it.  Soderbergh hops between blockbuster and indie purposefully, but this still wasn’t the rah-rah of ‘Erin Brockovich,’ nor was it the digestible indie eye behind ‘Traffic’.  Instead, we get an interesting compromise – the balloon of several big name actors supporting this title, and the doom and silence-between-the-moments that we normally don’t get on the big screen.

There’s not much to ‘splain ’bout the plot – it’s a disease film.  We start with who may or may not be patient zero – Gwyneth Paltrow – and then we follow the disease’s spread to its far reach.  What make this an unbearably affecting film is how real it feels.  The script sticks closely to the CDC and other organizations, flirting with the politics of disease control but more purposefully showing us and making us feel how it would feel, as a real person, to be confronted with a disease with a frighteningly frenzied increasing infection rate.  It draws the line at making the epidemic unrealistic – we know there will be a fix, more than likely – but it does make sure to show us that the choice between who can and can’t get infected is genetic, and has nothing to do with how high your billing is in the movie.

The film, as usual, looks beautiful.  Acting again as his own DP (uh… Pete Anderson, I think?), Soderbergh has gotten so effing good at shot placement, diffusion choices, etc.  Wherever his influences may lie, Soderbergh has influenced a generation of savvy film-makers that have aped his high contrast style and poppy pacing, but he’s had the time to master it moreso than these followers and due to that, ‘Contagion’ looks that much better than all his previous films.

Now this is all good news, but why isn’t it a perfect film?  Well, there’s some balance between it being a film and a pseudo-documentary that the pacing and intensity get confused on occasion.  It’s intensely frightening when you realize how far-reaching this is going to be, but then there are subplots that humanize and ground it.  I can’t say that there would have been a more ideal balance, but it’s an unfortunate compromise – full-fledged movie = Outbreak, full-fledged disease movie = Kingdom of the Spiders  or something.  ‘Contagion’ tries to walk the line and mostly succeeds.

Still, if you want something that’s going to scare the shit out of you and make you feel like you have no say in whether or not The Big Bug gets to take you down… well… here you go.  Watch it while eating dinner.