Table Talk: Contagion (2011)

Is Contagion a Modern Classic Now?

Anton: Like so many others during the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion. In fact, the movie was so on point that the nearly decade old thriller ranked as one of the top films on Netflix and Crave in Canada in late April.

I had seen the movie once before and had liked it. On November 28, 2013, I wrote in my movie journal: “Contagion is a slick, slow boiling, and unsentimental disaster movie, and as a prediction, it’s one of the most intelligent and believable I’ve seen on screen.” Now, in the aftermath of an actual global pandemic, the film’s portrayals seem even more prescient.

I admire Contagion as a film even more now than when I first viewed it. The screenplay by Scott Z. Burns is incredibly tight and effective, and I appreciate how Soderbergh’s use of narrative form and cinematic style contribute to the movie’s themes and its exploration of viral contagion.

So, in light of the film’s newfound cultural relevance as well as its filmmaking excellence, I want to ask, should Contagion be considered a modern classic? And to that end, we might explore related questions: can world historical events alter our reception of what was formerly considered only an above-average film? Was the movie doing things we didn’t notice before? How does it fit into Soderbergh’s larger body of work and into other broader trends?

Aren: I think the answer is unequivocally yes. I admired the film a great deal when I saw it in theatres in 2011, but I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to it. I thought it was slick, paranoid entertainment that did a great job of communicating how a global pandemic would occur in our current globalized world.

Now that we’re living in the midst of a true global pandemic, it’s impossible to feel removed from the film or the experiences of the characters. And furthermore, the sheer accuracy of the film is staggering. It’s not so much that the prescience of the film now makes it a classic in retrospect; it’s that the current pandemic has illuminated just how brilliant the film’s approach was in 2011. Our current existence has made us reevaluate and re-appreciate Soderbergh’s work.

The Network-Narrative Form

Anton: Soderbergh takes the network-narrative style and uses it to show how a globalized world’s interconnections facilitate the transfer of contagious diseases. This captures the relations between form and theme in previous network narratives, including Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), which used its multiple characters and sprawling narratives to demonstrate the complex web of drug use, trafficking, and enforcement.

Other network-narrative movies like Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) have shown global interactions, and Paul Haggis’ Crash (2005) explores the persistence of different forms of racism in our social interactions. Contagion uses narrative form to show the cause-and-effect but also the complexity of such issues on a global scale.

Aren: In the 2000s and early 2010s, network-narratives were extremely popular, as they allowed directors to have massive casts and address important socio-political themes without reducing their scale. Crash is probably the most notable film in this style that you call network-narratives—Roger Ebert and others referred to them as “hyperlink films.”

Anton: I prefer the term “network-narrative” from Bordwell.

Aren: But I think there’s an argument to be made that Contagion is the best of the ones made in the new millennium (you could consider Robert Altman’s films as being a part of the network-narrative tradition, but these modern films starting with Traffic seem distinct from earlier ensemble works). The reason I say this is that nothing better demonstrates the globalized scale of a network than viral spread. With Crash or even Traffic, racism or crime can spread like an epidemic, but it’s not a perfect metaphor, while Contagion isn’t even using a metaphor; it’s about a viral spread itself. And this viral spread demonstrates the interconnectedness of the characters—and by extension, the interconnectedness of the world that we, the viewers, live in—within the film itself.

Anton: I think the reason the narrative form works so well in Contagion is that the virus itself actually spreads through networks. So the form and how you show the story also parallels how you show a virus spread. There’s a greater union between the form and content that doesn’t require a metaphor. In contrast, Traffic uses parallel narratives to reveal not only connections but also differences, such as how the consequences and effects of the drug war are different depending on one’s role in the chain as well as one’s starting socio-economic situation. Crash, which I’ve only seen once, is perhaps more muddled. But it’s been a long time since I revisited. Would its narrative outline a view of systemic racism, or just interconnected individual racist encounters? I don’t know, but it’s maybe worth returning to the film. I really disliked Babel and found the narrative connections the most overwrought of the subgenre, the most blatant and arch use of the network form to deliver a thudding message.

Aren: I liked Crash well enough the one time I saw it, but that was years ago. Babel is classic pretentious drama from cinema’s most grating egotist.

I really admire how Contagion is structured around the actual response to a pandemic. It starts with outbreak, then goes to contact tracing, then to triage, then to vaccine development, and then finally vaccine deployment. Again, the marriage of structure and content is key here. Scott Z. Burns does a great job with the script. He gives us enough about each character to understand their motivations, but keeps his focus on the virus itself, which links them all and each other.

During key moments of interaction and viral spread, Soderbergh removes the sound track from the film, leaving only Cliff Martinez’s electronic score and the images themselves to tell the story. We get this shortly after the opening, when the initial outbreak spread occurs, with the man having the seizure on the bus in Tokyo, the waiter wandering deliriously into traffic in Macau, and the woman transporting a funeral urn full of ashes of a loved one on the bus in China and not surviving the trip. Thus, we get the entire outbreak in a montage of wordless storytelling, which is supremely effective.

Anton: It’s a great montage, and absolutely terrifying seen today.

As a Disaster Movie

Anton: What’s interesting to me is how the narrative form of Contagion contributes so much to the film’s sense of scale.

On close inspection, we can discern that this film was made on a more modest budget than most disaster films. There aren’t tons of specific effects. Shots of masses of people and streets are done in a smart way, but clearly the budget for VFX and masses of extras are somewhat limited. (Probably the huge cast took up most of the budget, would be my guess.) The global scale and extent of the virus’s reach are primarily suggested by montage and the narrative network storytelling.

Aren: Contagion is about as understated a disaster film as you can get, but within that understatement is some brilliance. It’s not an expensive movie, but it doesn’t waste any moments. Soderbergh may not show massive riots, but he has characters discuss them, and he has key moments that demonstrate the scale of the crisis, whether it’s the mass graves of bodies in Minnesota or Matt Damon’s Mitch Emhoff heading to the grocery store and witnessing mass looting and the guy trying to steal his gasoline when he returns to the car.

Anton: It lacks the big special effects that convey the scale in pretty much all the Roland Emmerich disaster epics. But you are right: Contagion still contains many familiar disaster movie elements. The briefings of experts and military officials. The escalation. The sense of panic, fear, and looming disaster.

(Side thought: I think Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) is somewhere between Contagion-level realism and Emmerich-style disaster movie.)

Aren: I think it’s also notable to focus on some of the mundane moments of the crisis that Soderbergh and Burns put into the narrative. Most disaster movies have a “no-turning-back” moment where disaster strikes and society is never the same, but with a pandemic, there is an eventual end to the outbreak. Contagion understands that a pandemic is not necessarily an apocalypse, even if it is utterly destructive.

As we’re learning with COVID-19, much of the experience of living during a pandemic is simply a waiting game—waiting out the peak of infections and for the eventual drop-off in the outbreak. Contagion has this element in its narrative focusing on Matt Damon’s Mitch, who is the everyman in the situation. A lot of critics didn’t like Mitch’s plotline when the film came out, thinking it was too domestic and bland, and simply an “everyman” view of a crisis without much in the way of conflict after the initial outbreak, but I think we can now appreciate the truth in the presentation here. In some respects, Mitch’s life is normal; he still has to cook for his daughter and go shopping for supplies, but mostly he stays at home. He experiences the crisis in a mundane way, through isolation and loneliness and anxiety, not through direct threat. And we’re all experiencing a bit of what Mitch goes through in the film; it’s not a bland storytelling decision, but an essential part of capturing the truth of life during a pandemic.

Anton: And Mitch also allows us to see the psychological effects of a pandemic on ordinary people, not just trained experts. He gets paranoid, and doesn’t want his daughter seeing her boyfriend. He feels lonely and confused and angry with authorities. In this way, it speaks to the moment, with all of us being submerged in the crisis.

Soderbegh’s style and other genre influences

Anton: The film’s technique contributes a lot to its total effect. Early on Soderbergh spends lots of time showing close-ups of objects, building up a sense of the virus’s transmission through montage and repetition.

The film also operates like a mystery to discover the source of the contagion, which is revealed in the final shots of the film, implicating how both our approaches to nature (ploughing trees) and farming (pigs in a feeding area) perhaps exacerbate the fragility of our global webs.

Aren: The ending is brilliant, but right now I want to focus on the visual style. Soderbergh weds some of his usual visual approaches—colour-coding different elements of the narrative with tints—with some formal tricks that are specific to this film. So we get Mitch’s scenes in Minnesota being blue, which is a classic Soderbergh approach, but we also get shifting camera focus within scenes, especially when it has to do with the viral spread, as well as some devastating smash cuts.

For instance, when Marion Cotillard’s WHO doctor is tracing the spread of infection through security cam footage of a casino in Macau, Soderbergh intercuts her investigation with close-up, narrow-focus shots of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Beth Emhoff interacting with people at games tables and at the bar. Shooting Paltrow, Soderbergh has the camera focus constantly racking between Beth’s hands, face, and objects she interacts with. The depth of focus is extremely narrow, so most things in the frame are a blur. Add this to his handheld camera, and you get this feverish visual approach, which is perfect in capturing Beth’s developing sickness.

In other moments, Soderbergh uses his crisp, deep-focus filmmaking style and focuses on surfaces and anything tactile. In one memorable scene, Kate Winslet’s Dr. Mears explains viral R0 (pronounced “R-nought”) transmission, as well as fomites, which is the name given to surfaces that spread infections. This is the scene where we get the memorable line that the average person touches their face two to three thousand times a day. Winslet’s Mears outlines this for us in dialogue, but Soderbergh is demonstrating a focus on fomites in his filmmaking right from the first scene. The film opens with a cough over a black screen—which is brilliant—and then we see Paltrow visibly not well in an airport bar. When she pays her bill, Soderbergh focuses on the handoff between her and the waitress, and then follows the waitress as she goes over to the pay system and touches its electronic screen. His camera rests on the surface. He is teaching us what to focus on throughout the film (what we touch) because it’s a means of depicting the viral spread without really explicitly showing a viral spread through CGI or macrophotography, or what have you.

Anton: I think what these techniques you describe also show is the film’s effective use of exposition. We get Mears explaining how things work to us, but we also learn how a contagion transmits through the narrative format and formal construction and editing of shots. The film teaches us a lot.

Aren: I also want to briefly point out how brilliant some of the editing is, not just from a narrative sense, in how the film conveys the story very elegantly by jumping between various narrative threads, but also in individual moments where a smash cut hits home the thematic impact or packs an emotional punch.

This is most notable in the moment where Kate Winslet’s Dr. Mears is dying in the Minnesota triage centre and she tries to hand over her coat to a fellow patient who is freezing. And then Soderbergh cuts from this futile gesture of humanity to a closeup of Mears’ dead face wrapped in plastic. It cuts to Larry Clarke’s Minnesota health official standing over her in PPE holding flowers and then Soderbergh cuts to a wide shot of mass graves and people in gowns and masks hauling bodies off of trucks. In one sequence of shots, Soderbergh connects the personal to the social and captures the scale of the death toll.

Connections to our moment

Anton: Both you and Anders have remarked in text conversations that Jude Law’s fringe blogger and anti-science, anti-establishment figure is seemingly prophetic and ahead of its time.

Aren: When I saw Contagion in 2011 and reviewed it for the University of Saskatchewan’s student newspaper, The Sheaf, I took issue with Jude Law’s character, Alan Krumwiede. I wrote: “He seems to be channeling the qualities of a real person, but there’s no specific individual in real life who matches his views or has his kind of sway over society.” In 2011, it may have been true that a blogger could not have his kind of pull, but in 2020, that is certainly not the case. Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich—I could keep listing people like Krumwiede who hold a huge sway over an audience through their online channels. This is another element of the film being prophetic. Burns and Soderbergh looked forward and predicted that fringe journalists would become more essential than mainstream ones in motivating people’s reactions to the virus.

However, he doesn’t ignore the conventional media. He even has a scene where CNN’s Sanjay Gupta interviews Laurence Fishburne’s CDC Director Cheever, where Cheever mentions concepts such as “social distancing” and frequent hand washing. Contagion shows the terminology and way the media would cover a pandemic years before we experienced it for real.

Anton: What’s sad is how even more conflicted our media and networks of information dissemination are today. While I like that the film shows the conflict within the culture (it’s not a unifying force automatically like an Emmerich disaster), but our own world has been even more divided, and our authorities have seemed less competent, sadly.

Wish I could have got one of those fish bowl helmets that Jude Law wears for going to the grocery store.

Aren: I’m also struck by a moment in the film where Matt Damon’s character tells his daughter that “It’s going to feel normal again. I promise.” When they learn about her vaccine lottery number, his daughter gripes that she’s going to miss another spring, another summer, and another fall before she can go out like normal. We’re all currently talking like this, furiously searching for an end date to the COVID-19 pandemic when it doesn’t feel remotely close.

Anton: Yup, we’re all waiting for the vaccine roll-out montage in real life.

Contagion (2011, USA)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Scott Z. Burns; starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan.