SLIFF 2011: The Artist

2011 // France // Michel Hazanavicius // November 10, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The Artist is enamored with the glamour and thrills of cinema’s silent era and, to an extent, of the early Golden Age that followed it. The film plainly expects that the viewer will find its deliberately anachronistic evocation of this period to be endearing. And, truth be told, it’s challenging to actively dislike a feature as wistful and fluffy as writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ shamelessly nostalgic film. In it, he spins the entwined tales of dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and newly-minted It-Girl Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), the latter ascending just as the former is fading away. Beyond presenting the film in black-and-white with era-appropriate intertitles, orchestral score, and 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Hazanavicius employs a plethora of touches to recall a time when Hollywood studios first began to embrace sound technology. These touches include not only formal flourishes such as filter effects and cranked-up frame rates in some scenes, but also pointedly creaky archetypes and visual gags. There’s an artistic conservatism to the use of these stylistic elements that isn’t found in the contemporary silent works of Guy Maddin, but they serve their purpose here.

Dujardin, who has previously collaborated with Hazanavicius as the titular, clueless secret agent in the director’s OSS 17 spy satires, channels Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Errol Flynn while adding a marvelous slathering of vintage comic sensibility. He’s a pleasure to watch, as is the spritely Bejo, who blends Rebecca Hall’s blinding smile and willowy profile with the cheekiness of a Depression-era film damsel. Inasmuch as the story has a conflict, it hinges on Valentin’s sudden and demeaning exile from Hollywood due to his prideful refusal to make talkies. Hazanavicius portrays the transition from silent to sound as a slow-motion tragedy, and Valentin’s fall as pitiable. The story necessarily recalls Singin' in the Rain, if it were shot through with dark Looney Tunes seizures. (Indeed, one nightmare sequence seems plucked from the feverish experiences of Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck.) The film serves in part as a facile criticism of show business’ slavish devotion to lowbrow tastes and its pitiless penchant for stampeding off in search of the Next Big Thing. The film underlines that criticism with its old school stylings—What could be more underground in 2011 than a silent film?—but its message lacks bite.

Eventually, Valentin’s downward spiral into alcoholism and suicidal despair (hi-larious!) is suddenly reversed in a manner that becomes more head-scratching the longer one dwells on it. The film is so attached to its protagonist (and Dujardin such a perfect charming rascal) that once Valentin’s problems are resolved, all seems right in the world. When the sour so abruptly turns sweet in this manner, however, one can’t help but feel a little cheated. There's a narrative sloppiness to the final act, a defect that points to the broader lack of diligence in the construction of the film. Unlike Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, with which it shares some narrative and thematic features, The Artist isn’t so much cloying as it is ramshackle and crudely considered. Hazanavicius blends together cartoonish tropes, lively dance numbers, restrained slapstick, and knowingly purple melodrama. Each component can be (and often is) engaging on its own, but the whole never seems to coalesce into a clear statement or point of view. Then again, perhaps a point of view isn’t necessary in a film so besotted with ephemeral pleasures.

Take Shelter

2011 // USA // Jeff Nichols // October 28, 2011 // Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Jeff Nichols’s riveting new film, Take Shelter, is perhaps the most frightening work of cinema I’ve seen this year, and unquestionably the best new horror film to land in theaters since Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Nichols’ film boasts vivid nightmare sequences and a bit of computer-generated creepiness, but its boogeymen are predominantly creatures of the mind, and therefore all the more plausible and terrifying. Fundamentally, Take Shelter is a film about the deforming qualities of dread itself, and about how it can devour a mind and all the lives that surround it. The fact that the mind in question is perfectly, horribly aware that this all-consuming dread is absurd… well, that just makes the disintegration all the more disturbing.

Curtis (the ever-enthralling Michael Shannon) is a geological driller in rural Ohio, blessed with a lovely, forthright wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and a sweet young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), whose deafness has only nurtured her parents’ devotion. Their life is simple but gratifying, the kind of existence that Curtis’ partner and friend, Dewart (Shea Whigham), will readily admit to envying once he has a few Friday night beers in him. Curtis, however, has begun to have distressing nightmares about an approaching thunderstorm, a storm that is somehow Different and Wrong. In addition to spawning fierce tornados, this storm unleashes a dark, thick rain resembling motor oil, and drives humans and animals alike to homicidal madness. Confronted with such harrowing visions, Curtis becomes distracted during his waking hours, and increasingly mystified by the omens that he sees in flocks of birds and arcs of lightning. Quietly, he begins to prepare for the apocalyptic storm that haunts his dreams. Frightened and embarrassed in equal measure, he conceals these preparations from his family and friends for as long as possible, while taking steps to evaluate his sanity.

Take Shelter functions chiefly as a character study of a splintering mind, a study presented from its protagonist’s unreliable perspective. It isn’t the first film to utilize this approach, of course. Just last year, Black Swan offered a similar first-person view of a mind losing its grip on reality, a mind trapped in a pitiless vice of rivalry and perfectionism. In contrast, Curtis gives every appearance of being an easy-going family man with no unusual mental strains beyond those common to just about every working-class American household. Therein lies the strength of Nichols’ script, which trenchantly mines the ashen pits of our collective anxieties, be they economic, cultural, religious, medical, or environmental. Eventually, the film reveals that Curtis’ mother suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Although this provides a rationale for his sudden outbreak of apocalyptic visions, it doesn’t diminish the horror of his situation. Indeed, it only serves to heighten Curtis’ most pragmatic fear: That he is hurtling towards a genetic destiny that will transform him from a provider into a shameful burden on his family.

What makes Take Shelter distinctive from previous films about the terror of mental illness is the resounding self-awareness of its protagonist. Curtis understands that his predicament is psychiatric in nature, and yet he is unable to stop planning for the unnatural threat he perceives on the horizon. He calmly (and secretly) takes out a loan to pay for the construction of an elaborate tornado shelter, even as his rational mind screams, “This. Is. CRAZY.” Shannon conveys this contradiction marvelously, providing an anguished and largely shuttered portrait. (When Curtis does finally explode with terror and fury, Shannon plays it utterly unhinged.) Curtis is a man caught between two distinct kinds of dread. On the one hand is the fear of the loss of identity, the terror that one’s own mind has a frantic life of its own that cannot be denied. Then there is the fear of an overwhelming threat that will tear apart the world, a fear that Nichols presents with startling acuity, while never forgetting that it is essentially chimerical.

The filmmaker’s effortless evocation of the rural Heartland setting is crucial, just as it was in his debut feature, Shotgun Stories, a rattling tale of Biblical retribution in the archetypal Shitty Little Town. In Take Shelter, the setting provides a credible, willfully prosaic substrate for Curtis’ dissolution. The film presents a rare reverse-shot examination of the proverbial Ordinary Guy who just snaps. Nichols’ film proffers that no one “just snaps.” True, Curtis is caught in a whirlwind that begins with his unlucky birthright. However, that whirlwind is fueled by his dumb Midwestern pride and a series of increasingly faulty decisions, each hastily made in the shadow of his waxing terror.

The film’s treatment of fearful conviction and looming Armageddon recalls several exceptional forebears, including Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, Todd Haynes’ Safe, and Bill Paxton’s Frailty. It shares with those films the phenomenon of “paradigm isolation,” wherein the protagonist is the lonely steward of a fearful, disruptive worldview. Of course, the psychological character of Take Shelter’s central conflict does not lessen the creepshow potency of the film’s nightmare sequences. Those are pants-shitting scary in their own right. The vividness of Take Shelter’s spine-tingling apocalyptic horror is one of the reasons its more down-to-earth chills of eroding sanity are so effective. There is little doubt that Curtis’ nightmares are the progeny of a malfunctioning mind, but those visions are so unsettling that they render his situation all the more pitiable.

Indeed, the film that Take Shelter brings to mind most readily is Night of the Living Dead, as it shares with that film a fear of a destructive reordering of the world into something unrecognizable and savage. Supernatural and science-fiction horror films such as Living Dead embody common human fears within literal monsters, but Nichols’ film seals its monsters within the mind of the hapless Curtis. This is cold comfort to the viewer, who sees what Curtis sees and feels his fear just as acutely as he does. In one of the most memorable shots in any film in recent memory, Nichols summons icy, stomach-flopping terror from little but a character’s slow, dead-eyed half-turn towards a kitchen knife. Cinematic moments don't come much more elemental than that.

Rosemary's Baby

1968 // USA // Roman Polanski // October 2, 2011 // DVD - Paramount (2000)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Roman Polanski’s most thematically absorbing and persuasive works are what I term his Dupe Films: Stories in which sinister forces manipulate and mislead the protagonist, who plays a central but unwitting role in their Machiavellian plots. In the films that comprise this narrative current—Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer—the hero eventually becomes aware of such exploitation and subsequently challenges their exploiters. However, in each of these films, whatever fleeting successes the protagonist claims are outweighed by the triumph of the puppet-masters in the end. Needless to say, Polanski’s Dupe Films are exceptionally bleak works, especially in aggregate, as they posit a world where the hapless victim of a conspiracy has no realistic hope of outflanking the coldblooded conspirators. The Tenant and The Ghost Writer (and to a lesser extent Rosemary’s Baby) are also secondarily “Dupe” Films in the sense that the hero follows the footsteps of an unfortunate predecessor, down to sleeping in their bed and tracing their route turn-by-turn.

Rosemary’s Baby offers the most uncluttered and successful expression of this narrative framework. It was Polanski’s fourth English-language film in as many years, and yet the script exhibits the kind of straightforward elegance that few native British or American filmmakers ever muster, particularly when it comes to the treacherous realms of supernatural horror. I hesitate to label it the best of the Dupe Films. Chinatown is undoubtedly a more daring and exceptional film overall, and The Tenant’s cracked-mirror reality has a visceral appeal for me, but it’s hard to deny that Rosemary’s Baby is an exemplar of clean-and-simple storytelling when laid alongside the other Dupe Films. No feature with a 136-minute running time can be brisk, but every minute of Rosemary’s Baby feels necessary and proper, like the individual stones in a garden labyrinth spiraling into an ever-tightening circle. Polanski relies on thriller and horror narrative conventions that were familiar even in 1968 (and are now downright mildewy), but somehow the film never seems schematic, even when the viewer can see exactly where it is going.

The film is an outlier in other ways: It is the only feature among the aforementioned five with a screenplay credited solely to Polanski, and also the only to boast a female protagonist. Needless to say, Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) femininity (and fecundity) are essential to the film’s story and its thematic preoccupations. Perhaps it’s a little hackneyed that the emotional terrain of Polanski’s most prominent female lead is so thoroughly dominated by the twin motives of fear and protectiveness. Consider that Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, The Ninth Gate’s Dean Corso, and The Ghost Writer’s nameless hero react with bristling resentment at being played for fools, and pursue their manipulators more out of offended pride than anything. (The Tenant’s cringing protagonist, Trelkowski, is the exception that proves the rule, as his malevolent neighbors aim to transform him into his female predecessor.) Still, Rosemary’s personality has a willowy realism that matches Farrow’s physical presence. She's lamentably naive, but also a little unruly, and posseses enough aptitude to ferret out the Satanic conspiracy that has designs for her unborn child. (Although, admittedly, she requires a male character’s posthumous help to point her to a crucial clue.)

Indeed, Rosemary’s Baby may not be a feminist film, but it portrays the social obstacles that women confront with devastating clarity. One quickly loses count of how many times characters patronizingly soothe Rosemary’s fears, or utilize gender-tinted guilt tactics to manipulate her. Ironically, Rosemary isn’t especially threatening to the male-dominated social order (secular or Satanic) that surrounds her. Her rather traditionalist yearning to settle down and have two or three children appears to be genuine, and she exhibits an eager-to-please submission to the demands of her actor husband’s (John Cassavetes) vanity. However, even her tiniest defiances are sins in the eyes of her devil-worshipping tormentors, who ruthlessly quash the influence of the outside world while nudging her in their preferred direction. Polanski tips his hand by having all the male characters react with revulsion to Rosemary’s ultra-short haircut: Stray outside the role assigned to you and you will face scorn.

Such cultural criticisms are consistent with the broader conflict of traditionalism vs. modernism that the film establishes. Following the path of many horror films, Rosemary’s Baby exploits the dichotomy of the old and the new for its thematic ends. However, unlike, say, Night of the Living Dead, the film’s anxieties are directed backwards to the fossilized past rather than forward to an alien future. Fear of aging and the elderly pervades the film, but its terrors are more complex than mere illness and mortality. Rosemary, for all her professions of maternal longing, seems to sense that she will lose something ephemeral (Her freedom? Her hipness?) after she becomes a mother and locks her life into a particular, conformist narrative. The Satanists profess a forward-thinking ideology that rejects Christian moral norms and declares a glorious Year One, but their designs for Rosemary are dreadfully retrograde, a point underlined by the fact that the film’s diabolists are all old enough to be cashing Social Security checks.

Disturbed by all the time her husband is spending with the dotty neighbors forty years his senior, Rosemary at one point proposes a party with their “old” (read: young) friends. It’s telling that once Rosemary’s female peers have a moment to sit down and listen to her miseries, they acknowledge and bolster her fears rather than dismissing them. Neither is it a mistake that Rosemary’s Satanic obstetrician warns her away from the advice of such young women, while urging her to take herbal concoctions rather than modern vitamin pills. The demonic is explicitly connected to the old-fashioned and traditional, down to the the “Anti-Virgin Mary” role that the more pragmatic Satanists have in mind for Rosemary. There’s something gratifyingly audacious about a film in which the gravest threat to a Luciferian cabal is not the Church (which is complicit with Rosemary's demonic rape in her drug-addled dreams), but a few liberated and levelheaded women.

Moneyball

2011 // USA // Bennett Miller // September 24, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Moneyball offers a spreadsheet warrior’s variation on a musty cinematic archetype: the Sports Underdog Film. Instead of focusing on a player or team, however, it trains its gaze on the offices of a big-league general manager. Specifically, the film presents the story of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who upends the world of professional baseball in 2002 with the aid of economics wunderkind Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Faced with the most paltry salary pool in the majors, Beane and Brand privilege on-base metrics to the exclusion of every other factor, jettisoning generations of recruiting wisdom that put great stock in personalities and gut feelings. As Moneyball attests, this approach allowed Beane to detect drastically undervalued players and assemble them into a misfit team that set the American League record for the longest winning streak of all time.

The appeal of Beane’s story is self-evident: It is a tale of iconoclasm, of institutional hypocrisy and inequity exposed on a multi-million dollar, national stage. Baseball has long thrived on its reputation as a game of statistics, but when Beane and Brand attempt to distill management down to an aseptic science, nearly everyone involved revolts: players, scouts, media, and fans. One needn’t be familiar with Oakland’s 2002 streak, or with the Michael Lewis book on which the film is based, to discern that Beane’s methodology will eventually be vindicated. It is a sports movie, after all. The film’s structure and rhythms are exceedingly familiar, but Moneyball still proves to be an engaging and knotty slice of drama, chiefly due to the lynchpin performances from Pitt and Hill. Pitt’s turn isn’t the revelation it was in, say, The Assassination of Jesse James or Burn After Reading, but it typifies the trait that makes him such a watchable screen presence, especially in middle age: His perfect balance of celebrity magnetism and frank humanity. Hill, meanwhile, shines in what amounts to his first dramatic role. He plays Brand as a ball of studious timidity, except when he is expounding on his hallowed statistical methodology, whereupon his steel-plated conviction shines through.

Bennett Miller’s direction is unobtrusive, to the point of being unimaginative at times, but in a sense it gives all the other talents plenty of room to breathe. This includes Pitt and Hill, but also screenwriters Steve Zallian and Aaron Sorkin, who stud the film with the tobacco-flecked quips and quotable locker room wisdom that the genre practically necessitates. Equally essential are the cinematography from Wally Pfister and score by Mychael Danna, which provide a strong aesthetic basis for the film’s smooth shifts in mood from forlorn to uneasy to wistful.

Major-league baseball is the film’s setting, but Moneyball is less about athletics per se that it is about gaming. Complex, multi-parameter systems present an alluring challenge: Given a set of rules and starting conditions, what principles should one follow in order to maximize a desired result? Poker sharks and fantasy sports leagues have long indulged in the compulsion to perfect a System for fun and/or profit; Moneyball is fundamentally about the pursuit of a System for real-world professional sports on a macro level. It’s not a mistake that a movie about baseball features so little baseball. In fact, the film’s backgrounding of the physical game allows Miller to flex his otherwise anemic stylistic muscles. The Athletics’ on-field tribulations are presented in almost collage-like fashion, with snippets of archival television footage, luscious slow-motion recreations, and snatches of play-by-play overheard on crackling radios.

Not everything works. The script’s determination to frame the story around Beane’s personal demons isn’t particularly successful, and Miller deflates the drama by dragging things on for about fifteen minutes too long. Moreover, there is a nagging paradox at work in any tale about a radical institutional realignment that so thoroughly embraces conservative storytelling tropes. For all that, I find it difficult to dislike the film. Moneyball is a shallow work, in that no thematic complexities lie beneath its prominent emotional landmarks, but it’s a finely crafted and refreshing shallowness, blessedly free of the nonsensical moralizing and over-developed cultural earnestness that plague so many "adult dramas".

Drive

2011 // USA // Nicolas Winding Refn // September 22, 2011 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Cinema)

In another reality, where Ryan Gosling was not available to assume the role of the nameless Driver in Nicolas Winding Refn’s peculiar, vitalizing new film, another young male actor could theoretically have done so without difficulty. However, Gosling’s physical presence—lean and boyish, casually self-possessed, and just a little bit crazy at the acute margins—is so essential to the effect of Drive that one can scarcely picture what such an alternate iteration of the film would look like.

This is not to say that the Driver is a demanding role, or that Gosling’s performance is some kind of actorly feat for the ages. There's just not enough texture to work with. In adapting James Sallis’ 2005 novel of the same name, director Refn and scripter Hossein Amini maintain a cool distance from their wheelman antihero, who carefully considers the world around him and speaks in short, clipped sentences. (The only exception being a terms-of-service speech he recites to his prospective clients, a monologue that self-evidently draws from a Hollywood bad-ass archetype that Drive itself embraces and critiques.) We never learn much about him or where he comes from, and the film’s rare glipses into his inner landscape have a stark simplicity that precludes a deeper interrogation of character. The Driver is a cipher, and Drive therefore cannot be properly regarded as a character study. It is, rather, a slick and invigorating noir piece.

For me, the film recalls Thief in its generic trappings and style, especially its smudgy vision of the nocturnal cityscape and the spectacular, synth-heavy score by Cliff Martinez. Moreover, Drive is preoccupied with masculine codes in a manner that unavoidably echoes any number of Michael Mann’s works. However, Refn embraces a dreamier, more unreal tone than Mann, and also a more brutal approach to violence that positions it pointedly alongside shimmering romanticism.

Refn opens the film with a nocturnal warehouse burglary and subsequent getaway, a dazzling sequence that reveals the Driver’s breathtaking talent behind the wheel and his unwavering dedication to a clear set of rules. (One of the little touches that hooked me into the film right away was the silence of the burglars, who simply ride along in mute terror, holding their breath at the approach of every squad car and helicopter. A different, less intriguing film would have placed a couple of wearisome mooks in the back seat to spout fearful exclamations with every cut.) Consistent with genre conventions, the Driver’s commitment to his rules is swiftly complicated by an emerging friendship with Irene (Carey Mulligan), the Pretty Thing down the hall who has a sweet little boy and a husband in prison. Meanwhile, the Driver’s restless mentor (Bryan Cranston) talks him into a stock car racing enterprise with a pair of backers (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman) who also happen to be loathsome, remorseless gangsters. Then Irene’s husband makes parole, goons start threatening the family, and the Driver finds himself wedged into a corner facing the proverbial One Last Job.

Drive’s narrative is hardly original stuff, but Refn’s copious visual and aural artistry and his somewhat removed, fable-like approach to that narrative make the film a wellspring of unexpected cinematic pleasures. It is, above all else, a familiar story presented in a very idiosyncratic mode. Viewers who settle in expecting a high-octane action odyssey are bound to be disappointed. Excepting the opening sequence and one other car chase at roughly the halfway point, the film features very little actual driving. It does, however, boast long, pregnant pauses; flat, self-consciously insipid romantic dialog; languid pop music interludes with on-the-nose lyrics; sequences that are little more than generous celebrations of Los Angeles’ ugly splendor; and an abundance of gruesome beatings, knifings, and shootings presented for maximum shock and revulsion.

Underneath these elements throbs a rather harsh appraisal of those aforementioned masculine codes. Gosling’s baby blues and soft-spoken affability charm the viewer, and the professional minimalism of his code suggests a fundamentally Good Man who does Bad Things because he has no other reliable talents. There is a critical moment in the film, however, when the mask drops, and the Driver is revealed to be capable of frightening cruelty. In that moment, the absence of access into the character’s mind becomes a blessing, and there is a modest relief at his inscrutability. No matter how noble his intentions or clinical his pursuit of vengeance, the Driver has been unavoidably tainted by a lifetime of criminality, and no code can protect him. In this light, the front-loading of the film’s most stunning car chase is a cunning stratagem. The life of the Driver is first drenched in nitro-fueled glamour, and then torn down in a flurry of appalling, blood-and-guts violence. It makes for a striking, tragic stripe of genre exercise, and one so aesthetically enthralling that it seems unkind to label it an exercise at all.

Contagion

2011 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // September 17, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Galaxy 14 Cine)

Steven Soderbergh has never been a filmmaker who does things in a workmanlike way. Even his most trifling films carry tracings of his signature qualities: the easy conjuration of contemporary chill, the steely confidence in his formal approach, and the shameless infatuation with his subject matter that somehow still seems poised. Contagion exhibits these characteristics, but it just might be his most purely functional film. (My equivocation reflects the fact that I have not seen Full Frontal or Haywire). Bear in mind that this is the director who gave the world not only a fluffy, ecstatically hip remake of Ocean's Eleven, but two sequels to that film. The Ocean's films might be disposable, but the cast and crew's fun-drunk vibe pulses right out of the screen, tugging the viewer along on waves of color, music, and razor-sharp fashion. Not so with Contagion, which has a similar one-note simplicity, but drapes it in such matter-of-fact grimness that it ends up not functioning particularly well as either art or entertainment.

Structurally, the film is more-or-less a Disaster Film, right down to the ensemble cast and procession of micro-narratives. In this instance, the disaster is a flu-like viral epidemic, which begins in Hong Kong and rapidly spreads across the world, killing infected individuals in a matter of days. Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns commendably maintain the focus on the scientists and medical doctors who are scrambling to understand the virus, contain its spread, and devise a cure. The film's approach celebrates the thankless work and unwavering dedication of its scientific protagonists: a CDC administrator (Laurence Fishburn), his field investigation ace (Kate Winslet), an experimental virologist (Jennifer Ehle), and a WHO epidemiologist (Marion Cotillard), among many others. The jargon comes fast and furious, but the film mostly refrains from glamorizing the practice of science with ludicrous, art-designed laboratory settings or laughably improbable technology. Nor does it paint the scientists as faultless superheroes, as it makes pains to show them succumbing to fear, arrogance, and selfishness in their weaker moments.

Matt Damon supplies the Everyman perspective as a suburbanite father whose wife (Gwenyth Paltrow) is one of the epidemic's first victims. He subsequently hunkers down with his daughter to hopefully outlast the plague and the resulting food shortages and violence. Inasmuch as the film has an antagonist other than the virus itself, it is Jude Law's conspiracy-preoccupied public health blogger, who rails against the evils of Big Pharma and government inefficacy, all while secretly profiting from his testimonials about a homeopathic "cure". (The blogger in me finds it unfortunate that Law's character is such a conniving asshole, but the scientist in me takes satisfaction in seeing homeopathic quackery so deservedly denigrated.)

The rigorously realistic, almost wonky way in which Contagion approaches its subject matter is admirable, and suitably fascinating for the 99.99% of filmgoers who don't live and breath epidemiology every day of their professional lives. Unfortunately, this commedable approach is employed solely to present a Cassandra-like message: Human civilization is vastly unprepared for the inevitable global epidemic that we know is coming, and if it survives it will mostly be by pure luck. That dire but clear-eyed declaration is the beginning and end of Contagion's purpose, effectively reducing the film to a work of slick agitprop on the behalf of the global public health infrastructure.

And more power to it in that respect. However, as a work of cinema there's just not much to Contagion other than what is presented on screen. Soderbergh has tackled sprawling ensemble works before with Traffic, but that film--for all its flaws--conveyed a profound appreciation for the complexities of human virtue and vice in an interconnected world. Contagion is thematically parched by comparison, and its stabs at humanizing pathos are weak. Soderbergh can be emotionally warm when appropriate (King of the Hill, Erin Brockovich), just as he can employ his more aloof style to find an oblique route under the skin of a character (The Limey, The Girlfriend Experience). However, neither of these approaches stands a chance of succeeding in Contagion, which spreads its story too thinly across multiple continents and characters, and is too fixated on justifiably frightening scientific fact.