Society infected with paranoia, fear in “Contagion”

If you touch your face, you will die. “Contagion”

Directed by Steve

Soderbergh

Starring: Matt Damon, Jude Law, Laurence

Fishburne, Kate Winslet

Grade B

If you touch your face, you will die.

At least that’s what happens in “Contagion” when an unholy combination of pig and bat disease wreak havoc on the human population, annihilating something like 5 percent of the world. The movie follows several characters, from an immune man whose wife was the first infected to the head of the Center for Disease Control — and some are more endearing than others.

From a cinematographic perspective, the film does an excellent job of storytelling with images. When the virus begins to spread, the camera’s eye captures the many objects that people touch each day, bringing the audience a very real level of horror about the potential contagions they come into contact with on a daily basis. It helps propel the story forward far better than any dialogue would.

Plot-wise, the directors took an interesting direction. Instead of just focusing on the sickness, a huge portion of the movie is dedicated to exposing the greed of some and the generosity of others. It very astutely shows how with such an outbreak, the contagion is not only physical — people’s minds become infected with fear, paranoia and greed.

It’s an excellent point. So well done, in fact, that it’s debatable whether the whole movie wasn’t meant to be a potential metaphor. Perhaps it was meant to highlight the capitalist tradition of profiting from others’ misery: Throughout the film, the pharmaceutical companies try to rub elbows with a journalist (Jude Law), who predicted the illness, to figure out the next big thing in medicine, saying that they didn’t create the need, they’re only meeting it.

On the other hand, the movie favorably portrays the government as well-ordered and regimented, which offers a juxtaposition to the insanity of the streets, where people ransack stores and raid their neighbors’ homes, shooting the occupants. It shows that with cohesiveness and order, humanity triumphs, but with separation and disorder, humanity crumbles.

While the plot is thought-provoking, too often the characters can be a bit black and white. The immune Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) is a good guy, so he keeps his uninfected daughter quarantined and mourns his wife despite her cheating just before returning home. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is a bad guy. He’s a truth “blogger” who initially seems good, but then callously makes money from the outbreak by feeding unverified and untested information to an audience that reads his work like gospel. Even in those moments meant to humanize him — like when he looks at the memorial to a woman who was presumably his pregnant ex-girlfriend — he seems only mildly wistful.

Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the Centers for Disease Control shines as one of the most balanced characters. While he’s working with government officials, he breaks rules by offering early, unreleased information to family members, but maintains his integrity..

The lack of character depth can mainly be attributed to the number of stories the movie attempts to tell. There is a bevy of superstars, and while each does an adequate job, more screen time might have afforded them more opportunity to develop characters. It would have certainly added to the tragedy of each death and furthered the audience’s emotional investment.

Still, the messages of the film are apparent — without cooperation and structure, people die; with cooperation and structure, humanity won’t annihilate itself.