Beware Germs and Bloggers

The first hour of “Contagion,” the new movie by Steven Soderburgh, is as taut and terrifying as any horror movie or thriller I’ve ever seen. After a prologue in which only a few hoarse coughs are heard, it starts with “Day 2” typewritten on the screen, as Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), looking a bit green about the gills, talks on the phone to an unseen lover. Sweaty and pale, she completes her business trip in Hong Kong and heads home, by way of Chicago, to Minneapolis, where her young son and husband await her. The movie cuts back and forth between her, quickly getting sicker, and a few others — a Japanese traveler, a young man wandering the streets of Hong Kong, a pretty young blonde on her way home to Europe. All are sick and all are touching a lot of stuff in their path: The camera lingers on a water glass, a credit card, a door handle, a pole on a bus. Beth has a seizure, is rushed to the hospital and dies, to the disbelief of her husband (a warm and understated Matt Damon), who repeats, “But she just had jet lag!”Within days, the number of victims multiplies and the government gets involved. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) starts tracking the growing epidemic. The movie is not just a cautionary tale: “This really can happen here, so wash your hands and stockpile canned beans.” Rather, the message is that in today’s atmosphere of paranoid politics and Internet-spread conspiracy theories, there is something you can trust — science. Seen here in the form of CDC doctors (Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet, sober and intense as they follow the movements of the early carriers), they track the disease’s spread and identify its genetic makeup so a cure can be found. Jennifer Ehle stands out in the superb all-star cast as Dr. Ally Hextall, the scientist who figures out that “the wrong pig met the wrong bat” to create a very very bad germ. The bad guys here aren’t the usual bureaucrats trying to stop crusading truth-tellers — just the opposite. An opportunistic blogger (Jude Law, sporting snaggled teeth and an Australian accent) hits all the familiar notes of today’s online rage-mongers as he pushes an alternative cure he claims the government doesn’t want anyone to know about because it can’t be patented and thus there are no profits in it. “I have 12 million readers, and if I tell them not to get the vaccine, they won’t,” he says, chillingly, late in the movie. The ethical and legal questions such a widespread emergency poses aren’t glossed over — Who pays for the hospital wards set up in stadiums? Who gets the vaccine first? — but they don’t bog down the plot, which moves as quickly as the virus spreads. Although there are plenty of gruesome scenes (Paltrow haters have been exulting in her character’s unfortunate fate), Soderbergh is mostly restrained. This is no zombie movie. Even when martial law is imposed and thugs loot stores and homes looking for food, it still feels recognizable as the world we live in now. Teenagers still text their boyfriends, TV newscasters keep on talking and the scientists keep on working. When we finally find out what happened on Day 1, it’s as jarring as it’s meant to be — happy people, touching things and other people, as we are wont to do, only now we know the terrible consequences. What’s going on in that restaurant kitchen? Who touched that subway pole? Why is that guy coughing? And do I really touch my face 3,000 times a day? After watching this movie, you might not touch anyone, or anything, ever again. “Contagion” is showing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY and elsewhere. It is rated PG-13 for disturbing content and language.