'Contagion' Review: Not the Ideological Moments You Expect From Matt Damon Film

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years about Hollywood, it’s that actors love being part of disaster movies. Whether it’s “The Towering Inferno” or “The Poseidon Adventure,” or any one of the insane “Airport” movies from the ’70s, they were jam-packed with ridiculous combinations of stars whom no one would ever consider placing together onscreen otherwise.

That tradition comes back strong this Friday with “Contagion,” a film that boasts a cast featuring such Oscar nominees and winners as Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Jude Law in addition to longtime TV and movie favorite Laurence Fishburne and three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston. Hell, Cranston took a part in this epidemic epic even though he does two brief scenes buried amid all the mayhem.

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Now, I know that for most BH readers, seeing the name “Matt Damon” at the bare minimum has them cracking their fingers as they ready a diatribe about how proud they are for never seeing one of his movies, despite the fact that he’s now among Clint Eastwood’s most frequent collaborators. I catch a lot of flak for liking these films like “Invictus” and “Hereafter,” but then again, I’m reviewing how well a movie is made rather than casting eternal judgment upon Matt’s soul.

I’ll point out when he puts a sucker punch – or at least I try. I’m not quite as hawkeyed as some of our dear readers. But this movie has a few ideological surprises in store, and I’ll spell them out right off the bat so that everyone can either cool down and read the rest of the review or perhaps on the other hand, to fuel the fire even more as people say “OK, those ARE good points, but it’s STILL Matt Damon! And he can never redeem himself!”

So, first off, Matt doesn’t come up with a government conspiracy behind the epidemic, which is caused by a nasty intermingling of bat and pig that I’ll keep a secret since it makes for an awesome ending to the movie. In fact, the rare characters who imply that there’s a government epidemic causing the problem are all shot down.

The one character who espouses a conspiracy theory about the government and big pharmacies trying to kill us all for profit is himself proven to be the only scumbag exploiting the situation for money, and he’s a lone wolf who’s not tied to Corporate America or Big Pharmaceutical Companies. The problem in “Contagion” is unequivocally dealt with as a purely scientific mystery.

Second of all – and here’s the part where minds will perhaps literally blow open – when Damon finds that a neighbor has been shot and robbed at gunpoint by looters, he races out and finds a shotgun in that house and proceeds to wield it for several more scenes. It is absolutely clear that he sees a gun as key to his and his daughter’s safety and survival.

And third, there are a couple of subtle Christian touches in the film, as when a nun is shown comforting a patient, and another moment where a shelter in an Asian county has been constructed with an enormous cross on the roof when the characters involved are not even missionaries. Touches like that, even when small, are intentional in a Hollywood film and surprising when coming from this gang of actors and director Steven Soderbergh. Could they be a sign of hope that even liberal mainstream filmmakers are acknowledging Christianity does play a positive force in everyday life?

Now, on to the film itself:

Imagine your wife takes a business trip to Hong Kong, and when she comes home she seems to have a truly nasty case of the flu: sweats, shakes, splotchy skin and unending coughing and sniffles. Within two days, she passes out on the kitchen floor, foaming at the mouth and dies at the hospital – and within another 24 hours your six-year-old stepson is also dead from the same symptoms.

Now all you’ve got left is your teenage daughter and a horrible dose of survivor’s guilt, with not a single clue about how your wife got sick or the fact that world health officials consider her to be the Patient Zero, or first carrier, of a deadly global epidemic. The battle by that father to keep his daughter safe and maintain his sanity as the world collapses around them is just one of the six powerfully drawn, well-acted storylines in the new thriller “Contagion,” which marks an intelligently pulse-pounding return to form for Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director of “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic.”

“Contagion” plays like a smarter, more methodical take on the 1995 thriller “Outbreak,” in which Dustin Hoffman leads the fight to save the world from an outbreak of a deadly monkey virus. But where that film deteriorated into hokey fun and ludicrous action shenanigans from its diminutive star, “Contagion” has a more realistic and thoughtful approach that is all the more squirm-inducing because it seems far more realistic.

The film zips around the globe from Hong Kong to Minneapolis, from the heart of China to Chicago, and from London to Tokyo with each city’s population totals spelled out on screen to goose the fear of how many people could be wiped out in each locale. Soderbergh knows that dropping us into impersonal megacities like Tokyo, with 36 million people, while following individual contagion carriers effectively taps into our own daily fears of catching something from the person next to us on a bus, train or movie theater seat.

At the same time, he deploys an incredible cast with precision that makes the intertwining stories compelling to follow. Fishburne plays the head of the Centers for Disease Control, Winslet is an ace epidemic specialist, and Law nearly steals the show as a blogger who’s touting a cure for the epidemic and is alleging that a government conspiracy is behind the panic while hiding secrets of his own.

Add in Damon as the newly widowed father at the heart of it all and Paltrow as his quickly-deceased wife whose Hong Kong trip is retraced through security-camera footage, and viewers will find plenty of rewards in the acting alone. But writer Scott Z. Burns digs deeper than one expects, moving beyond thrills to realistically show how within a matter of weeks quarantines and diminishing food supplies could easily lead even our civilized society into mass panic and chaos.

And just when you think that a happy ending is on its way, Burns and Soderbergh play the ace up their sleeves by revealing how Paltrow got infected in the first place. That sequence of events is both completely plausible and utterly chilling – and showing us that our worst nightmares are a step away from our everyday realities is the scariest thing of all.