Contagion

Steven Soderbergh's brisk and effective Contagion spends most of its running time not getting too close to its subject, and the movie is all the better for its director's refusal to indulge in sentiment. The "horror" of Contagion lies in just to what extent the world would play catch-up in an outbreak of a new virus like the one in Scott Z. Burns' script. The CDC doctors (Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle) have trouble synthesizing the virus to develop a vaccine and are afraid the bug will escape even their most secure laboratory. (I wanted more of Elliott Gould as a government-defying scientist.) A Minnesota father (Matt Damon) immune to the virus whose wife (Gwyneth Paltrow in an against-type cameo) may be Patient Zero discovers the lengths he'll go to in order to protect his daughter as society begins to give into panic. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) tracking the disease's roots is literally stranded by the fears that the First World will get preferential treatment when a vaccine is developed. Soderbergh nimbly crosscuts between all of these characters and each actor makes something out of his role with just a few lines to fill in the background. Fishburne's Dr. Cheever is the soul of unflappable professionalism as the crisis unfolds; we almost don't realize he's broken confidentiality and warned his fiance (Sanaa Lathan) to flee in advance of a quarantine until someone is chastising him about it two scenes later. If Contagion is too rushed it's in how it handles the character of Erin (Kate Winslet), a doctor charged with organizing a response to the initial outbreak in Minnesota. There was more to be made out of the conflict between public safety and the desire of local politicians to avoid inciting fear in the voters.

Contagion makes its one false move with the character of Alan (Jude Law), a blogger who uses his site to push a conspiracy angle in the way information is dispensed about the crisis. Alan goes from yellow journalist to full-on snake oil salesman when he starts advocating forsythia as a homeopathic treatment for the virus, and there's a suggestion that Alan is acting at the behest of unscrupulous speculators. These scenes arrive feeling stuck in the screenwriter's brain and never take off; Alan's charges are too vague for the credence they get on the Web to feel earned and the reasoning behind the forsythia plot is never explained. Do Soderbergh and Burns mean for us to take Alan as a journalist undone by greed, or as something else? Law's role lacks motivation and his scenes are distractions from the medical detective story. I can't remember where I heard Contagion described as movie that's really about the effects of 9/11 on society. I don't know that I think Soderbergh had something that topical in mind, but he has made a movie about how far an unexpected crisis can take us from ourselves.