by Louis Williams

Created on: November 17, 2011

Contagion

This is a story at least as old as Herodotus: a plague arises and the social order takes a hit it will remember for hundreds of years and, with skillful enough eye-witness writers and diarists, for thousands. It’s almost a set of cliches: a first case seemingly out of nowhere followed by a horrifying death; more deaths, showing the virulence of what is soon recognized as either a new disease or the hand of God strangling a sinful earth; dedicated doctors risking their own lives to learn what the disease is and find/forge a cure; mounting numbers of the sick and dying; anarchy stemming from fear and hopelessness; then, finally, a few rays of hope as some of the dying, ministered to, climb back toward health amid scenes of social breakdown as the majority descend further into illness; then, the real turning point when the vaccine/magic bullet is discovered, and the world, in spite of millions of deaths, becoming safe again.

With a remarkable cast — Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Madeline Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, and many more, the film is yet static, more like a documentary than an account of fictional lives under stress. Though the characters are face to face with us, we seem to see them always at a distance, since they are types far more than individuals. Also, we’ve seen them all before in other movies, both those about encroaching diseases and those related, such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “Battle Los Angeles” where an initially unsuspecting public finds itself faced with tall odds, if not from microbes or the dead, then from space aliens or vampires. Almost always, we end assured that there is indeed a normal world where mankind can have normal expectations.

At the same time we’re shown that what we call normality is largely a matter of luck, that it’s always thoroughly possible that the ship — your ship — will sink, the green valley be invaded by monsters, the twin towers fall, the naval base on a Sunday morning be blown to pieces, the cradle itself be visited by death. Normality is preferable, but all these other things have happened, too, indeed these things, or their counterparts, happen all the time.

The last thing we see is a bat relieving himself from the roof of a pig barn and the pigs below eating what he gave them and then the pigs being slaughtered to be fed, one of them, to Gwyneth Paltrow, on a junket in the Far East. She gets sick on the way back to the States and is one of the first to die. It isn’t that the bat was evil, or the pigs, It’s just that whatever the bat had been eating was viral and ended by killing millions of people. Matt Damon, Paltrow’s husband in the picture is, totally by chance, immune to the virus that kills his wife. There is no full accounting for death and life in such situations. The film makers here give us a short treatis on man’s fate. Man suffers and dies, or suffers surrounded by death and lives scarred for the rest of his life.

Not a barrel of laughs, this movie, but one that does tell the truth.

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