Reviews

Contagion During a Pandemic

Michael Hayward

Watching Steven Soderbergh’s 211 film Contagion again, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed much less overwrought and histrionic—less of a zombie-free horror film—than it had the first time I’d watched it, nine years ago. This time around, Contagion played almost as if it were a straightforward documentary film—one on which a few minor fictional embellishments had been overlaid (or did it more closely resemble a feature-length public service announcement, the earnest efforts of a few well-intentioned Hollywood A-listers—Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Kate Winslet among them—who’d pooled their talents in a desperate attempt to save the world? “For God’s Sake, Don’t Eat the Free Peanuts in That Little Bowl on the Counter of the Airport Bar!”; “And Don’t Touch Anything without Gloves!”). By mid-March of 22 Contagion had become more popular than ever, ranking among the top ten films offered on Netflix Canada and on iTunes. It had become the centrepiece of everyone’s private Pandemic Film Fest (along with The Andromeda Strain, 12 Monkeys and the 1994 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand). Contagion’s more-or-less accurate portrayal of events seemed to confirm the film’s overall reliability. As a result we watched Contagion to feel grateful for “Bullets That We’d Somehow Dodged” (no armed B&Es in our neighbourhood, thank god!); we wondered about various “Missing and Deleted Scenes” (what happened to toilet paper hoarding?). Mainly, though, we watched Contagion to determine where we were on the pandemic timeline, in particular, to learn “What Might Be Coming Next.” So: just what did I learn with Contagion as my guide? That a vaccine would be found!—and much sooner than our official spokespeople had been saying (other than Trump, that is, who famously insisted that a cure was, in fact, already among us, in the form of a miraculous antimalarial drug, to be combined with UV light, and—possibly—injected bleach). According to Contagion, the world could expect a vaccine to be discovered on or about Day 131 of the pandemic. Which, by my calculations, meant something like mid-May. Unfortunately, we seem to have missed that deadline—which confirms my secret fear that Contagion is, in the end, more of a hopeful fantasy and less of a documentary than I had wished.

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