Contagion is a 2011 American medical thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns. Its ensemble cast includes Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The plot concerns the spread of a highly contagious virus transmitted through respiratory droplets and fomites, attempts by medical researchers and public health officials to identify and contain the disease, the loss of social order as the virus turns into a worldwide pandemic, and the introduction of a vaccine to halt its spread. To follow several interacting plot lines, the film makes use of the multi-narrative "hyperlink cinema" style, popularized in several of Soderbergh's films. The film was inspired by real-life outbreaks such as the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak and the 2009 flu pandemic.
Following their collaboration on The Informant! (2009), Soderbergh and Burns discussed a film depicting the rapid spread of a virus. Burns consulted with representatives of the World Health Organization as well as medical experts such as W. Ian Lipkin and Larry Brilliant. Principal photography started in Hong Kong in September 2010, and continued in Chicago, Atlanta, London, Dublin, Geneva, and San Francisco Bay Area until February 2011.
Contagion premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2011, and was theatrically released by Warner Bros. Pictures on September 9, 2011. Commercially, the film made $136.5 million against its $60 million production budget. Critics praised it for its narrative and the performances, as did scientists for its accuracy. The film received renewed popularity in 2020 due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Plot
Returning from a Hong Kong business trip, Beth Emhoff meets up with a former lover during a Chicago layover. She feels slightly ill; two days later, back home in Minneapolis, she suffers a seizure and dies from an unknown illness. Her 6-year-old son, Clark, also dies. Beth's husband, Mitch, is isolated but found to be naturally immune. After being released, he quarantines with his teenage daughter, Jory, at home.
In Atlanta, Department of Homeland Security representatives meet with Dr. Ellis Cheever of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over concerns that the disease may be a bioweapon. He dispatches Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis, where she traces everyone having had contact with Beth. She negotiates with reluctant local bureaucrats to commit resources for a public health response. Later, Mears becomes infected and dies, and is buried in a mass grave. As the novel virus spreads, citywide quarantine orders cause panic buying, widespread looting, and violence.
At the CDC, Dr. Ally Hextall determines the virus is a combination of genetic material from pig and bat-borne viruses. Scientists are unable to discover a cell culture to grow the newly identified MEV-1 (Meningoencephalitis Virus 1). Cheever determines the virus too virulent to be researched at Biosafety level (BSL) 3 laboratories and restricts all work to BSL 4 labs only. Hextall orders University of California, San Francisco, researcher Dr. Ian Sussman to destroy his samples. Believing he is close to finding a viable cell culture, Sussman secretly continues his research and identifies a usable cell culture from which Hextall develops a vaccine. Scientists determine MEV-1 is spread by respiratory droplets and fomites, with a basic reproduction number of four when the virus mutates; they project that 1 in 12 people on Earth will be infected, with a 25–30% mortality rate.
Conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede claims he cured himself of the virus using a homeopathic cure derived from forsythia. People seeking forsythia violently overwhelm pharmacies. Krumwiede, having faked being infected to boost forsythia sales, is arrested for conspiracy and securities fraud, though his fanbase immediately bails him out. Meanwhile, Hextall inoculates herself with the experimental vaccine and then visits her infected father. She does not contract MEV-1, and the vaccine is declared successful. The CDC awards vaccinations by lottery based on birthdates. By this time, the death toll has reached 2.5 million in the U.S. and 26 million worldwide.
Earlier in Hong Kong, World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologist Dr. Leonora Orantes and public health officials comb through CCTV footage of Beth's contacts in a Macau casino and identify her as the index case. Government official Sun Feng, believing the US has secretly developed a vaccine, kidnaps and holds Orantes for months as leverage to obtain the first vaccines for his village. WHO officials provide the village with fake vaccines, and Orantes is released. Learning the vaccines were placebos, Orantes goes to warn the village. Meanwhile, life begins to return to normal, with public venues accessible for those with a vaccine bracelet.
In a flashback to the spillover event, a bulldozer from Beth's company clears a tree in China, disturbing a bat colony. One bat takes shelter in a pig farm and drops a piece of infected banana, which is consumed by one of the pigs. The pig is in turn slaughtered and prepared by a chef in a Macau casino, who, without washing his hands, transmits the virus to Beth via a handshake.
Cast
Matt Damon as Mitch Emhoff Damon viewed his character as the embodiment of the "everyman"—an individual who is seen as one of the human faces of the supervirus following his wife and stepson's deaths. Soderbergh also noted Mitch's "common individual" lack of medical and scientific knowledge, though keeping the situation dynamic and compelling was challenging for the director, as he was concerned that Emhoff would be a one-dimensional character. Soderbergh felt that Damon understood the concept and addressed the producers' concerns. "You never catch him acting", said Soderbergh. "There's no vanity, no self-consciousness in his performance; it's as if the cameras aren't there." Writer Scott Z. Burns sent him a copy of the script with a "read this and then go wash your hands" note attached to it. Damon recalled: "I just really want to be in this movie. It was a terrific, riveting, really fast read and really exciting and really horrifying, but managed to be really touching." Laurence Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever Soderbergh admired Fishburne's ability to portray an emphatic and assertive figure in previous films. To Fishburne, Cheever was a "smart", "competent" physician who often epitomized a "voice of reason". Once he conferred with W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist and professor at Columbia University, the character's complexities were nonexistent for the actor. Fishburne stated, "The personal stuff that I have as Ellis Cheever was telling my fiancée, soon-to-be wife, Sanaa Lathan, to get out of town, to leave, to pack up, to not talk. That's really easy. Any human being in that situation is going to do that, I think."
Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede Krumwiede is an ardent conspiracy theorist who, according to Law, is the so-called index patient for "what becomes a parallel epidemic of fear and panic". "We definitely wanted him to have a messianic streak", said Soderbergh, whom Law talked to during the character's creating process. The two men discussed the appearances and the behaviors of a typical anti-government conspiracy theorist. Producer Gregory Jacobs commented that "what's interesting is that you're not really sure about him. Is the government really hiding something and does the herbal remedy he's talking about really work? I think we all suspect at one time or another that we're not getting the whole truth, and in that sense, Krumwiede represents the audience's point of view." Gwyneth Paltrow as Beth Emhoff A "working mom", as described by Paltrow, Beth is the central figure in the detective process. Despite being among the virus' first victims, Paltrow believed that Beth was "lucky" as she thought the disease's survivors were being left to deal with the newly difficult conditions of everyday life, such as finding food and potable water. When on location in Hong Kong, Paltrow was instructed by Soderbergh to take photographs to be used in the film and admitted she was apprehensive about the assignment. "I was just another tourist taking pictures", she said, and added, "I did feel a little pressure. When Steven Soderbergh gives you a photo assignment, you had better come back with something decent."
Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer In researching her character, Winslet traveled to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), currently in Atlanta, Georgia, where she consulted with current and former officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service to receive insight on not only the daily life but on the type of person qualified for the occupation. "These are people who can be sent into war zones where there's been an outbreak of a new virus. Fear is not an option. If they feel it, they learn to push it aside." Winslet felt that Mears was able to bring the epidemic "down to the layman's level" so the viewer could comprehend the scope of it without the science dragging the story down. Bryan Cranston as Rear Admiral Lyle Haggerty, United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps Jennifer Ehle as Dr. Ally Hextall, a research scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Soderbergh had seen Ehle's performance in Michael Clayton (2007), though it was ultimately cut prior to the film's release, and it prompted him to offer her a role in Contagion. He "had known who Jennifer was for a long time, and this didn't take a lot of thought, honestly". Elliott Gould as Dr. Ian Sussman, a scientist at the University of California San Francisco Chin Han as Sun Feng Han spoke of his character's development: "He starts off as a button-down, serious ... government official, and then as the movie progresses ... you find out a different side of him and his secret agenda."
Marion Cotillard as Dr. Leonora Orantes, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization Orantes' main objective is to trace the origins of the MEV-1 pathogen. Cotillard, a fan of Soderbergh's work, first met with the director in Los Angeles, California. The French actress was enthralled with the script because she was "very concerned about germs. I've always been ... scared, in a way, by all of those disease[s]. So ... it was really something I was really interested." Soderbergh said that Orantes "gets dropped into situations and has to deal with cultural as well as scientific issues that are sometimes at odds", and notes that she has a "professional" yet stubborn, "remote", and "dispassionate" demeanor, though "something happens to her in the course of the story that causes a significant emotional shift." Additionally, the film also stars John Hawkes as Roger, CDC custodian and acquaintance of Dr. Cheever; Anna Jacoby-Heron as Jory Emhoff, daughter of Mitch Emhoff; Josie Ho as the sister of Li Fai, who was the first to be infected with MEV-1 in Hong Kong; Sanaa Lathan as Aubrey Cheever, initially fiancee/later wife of Dr. Cheever; Demetri Martin as Dr. David Eisenberg, CDC colleague of Dr. Hextall; Armin Rohde as Damian Leopold, a WHO official; Enrico Colantoni as Dennis French, a Department of Homeland Security official; Larry Clarke as Dave, a Minnesota health official working with Dr. Mears; and Monique Gabriela Curnen as Lorraine Vasquez, a print journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Production
Conception and writing