The calm is what's so startling in "Contagion" — the cool precision with which Steven Soderbergh depicts a deadly virus that spreads throughout the world, quickly claiming millions of victims.
There is no great panic in his tone, no hysteria. Soderbergh has amassed a dazzling cast of Oscar winners but this is not like those 1970s disaster movies that had melodrama to match their star power.
Characters become increasingly confused and frustrated, they struggle to survive and then die in a matter-of-fact way. Even the eventual instances of looting and rioting that crop up feel like blips of intensity, understandable reactions to an incomprehensible situation.
Working from a script by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote his 2009 comedy "The Informant!," Soderbergh takes us from suburban living rooms to labs at the Centers for Disease Control to remote Asian villages with equally clear-eyed realism. The attention to detail, and to the infinite ways germs can spread that we probably don't want to think about, provide the sensation that this sort of outbreak really could happen right now.
"Contagion" begins with Gwyneth Paltrow's character, Beth, coughing as she reaches into a bowl of peanuts at an airport bar on her way home to Minneapolis from a business trip in Hong Kong. This is Day 2, we are told, and she will end up being Patient Zero. With the help of a low-key but propulsive electronic score, Soderbergh steadily focuses on the hands as he jumps from Chicago to Tokyo to London in these early scenes, fluidly revealing how we pass our credit card to a waitress or grasp a bus railing or press an elevator button.
Kate Winslet's character, the steely Dr. Erin Mears, who thrusts herself into the vortex as the virus starts developing, offers a chilling statistic to some skeptical medical administrators: We touch our hands to our face 2,000 to 3,000 times … a day.
Matt Damon, as Paltrow's stoic husband, Mitch, tries to stay strong and protect his teenage daughter as it becomes clear that they're both immune. Jude Law, believably skeevy as an online journalist with questionable ethics, digs for the truth of the story, but government scientists are just as keen on stopping the spread of information as they are the disease itself.
Winston-Salem native Jennifer Ehle might just steal this thing as Laurence Fishburne's right-hand woman, Dr. Ally Hextall. She is racing to find a vaccine even as the number of dead skyrockets. Like the film itself, she's got an irresistible cool about her. But she is also so confident and radiates such no-nonsense intelligence, she commands the screen every time she shows up. (And how great is it that three of the top scientists here are strong, decisive women?)
Her performance represents one of many elements of "Contagion" that will make you stop and think. And then wash your hands.
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