CONTAGION (USA 2011) ****
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

CONTAGION follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. The film begins at Day 2 of the virus and ends with Day 1 showing how (fictitiously) the virus really originated.  The film is a dead serious documentary style fictionalised piece following the epidemic as it grows worldwide with the medical community racing to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself.

The subject is still hot-off the press as people have still not forgotten the deadly impact of SARS and other infectious diseased such as West Nile and the swine and bird flues.  The script by Scott Z. Burns likely follows the headlines and documentation of SARs.  All this makes the film work like a time bomb thriller with many subplots.

The main plot concerns the start and spread and containment of the epidemic here named the bird flu.  The story includes the discovery of the vaccine and how it is distributed not leaving out the problems of who is entitled to receive it first.  The film also takes the pandemonium one step further by allowing the flu and deaths to spread across all the continents with rioting that results from insufficient vaccine production.

To humanize the story, the script adds several real life characters.  The main one is the Center for Disease Control’s Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) asked by a deputy from the Department of Homeland Security (Enrico Colantoni) to contain he problem.  He is no angel and makes mistakes by evacuating his loved one thus leaking out confidential information.  Another involves Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) who develops a slight cough as she waits in a Chicago airport to go home to Minneapolis and be with her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and son Clark (Griffin Kane).  By the following afternoon, she is dead from an unknown cause.  Then there is the CDC investigator Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) investigating Emhoff’s death and the city’s growing virus cluster while World Health Organization investigator Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) heads to China to track the virus’ origin.  Meanwhile, at the CDC, doctors Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and David Eisenberg (Demitri Martin) attempt to grow the virus in a lab so they can begin testing vaccines.  Finally, freelance blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) seizes the opportunity to report the story and then seizes a far more villainous opportunity as he preys upon fear and paranoia to feed his messiah complex.

To his credit, Soderbergh balances the characters quite well with his intercutting of the stories so that it does not feel as if he is a traffic cop directing traffic.  It helps that the plot is so strong that the subplots flow conveniently into each other.  Soderbergh moves his film fast, especially during the second half and the film works like a thriller with a time bomb waiting to explode.  With the revelation of how the flu originated, the climax ends like the solution of a whodunit.  The poor Chinese look like the villains in the film though they get tricked into given false vaccines by the Americans.

CONTAGION is an ambitious piece that can clearly look silly and fall apart in the hands of an inexperienced director.  Fortunately, we have Steven Soderbergh at the helm, and he has done a film like this before with TRAFFIC where he tackled the topic of drugs on a wide scale.