Contagion vs Safe

This is the move. You’re in a public restroom, and you wash your hands, obviously. The first towels you take to dry your hands go in the trash. Then you take another, to open the door, and toss it in the trash behind you before the door closes. In a pinch you can use the cuff of your sleeve, but that requires you to always wear long sleeves, which you’ll want if you have to sneeze, since you should sneeze into your elbow, and not into your hand, in case you have to shake hands with someone.

And you should never, ever shake anyone’s hand, because they don’t know about the other rules, and other people’s hands will fucking kill you in forty-eight hours.

It’s a shame no one got to Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) with this news in time. Beth has been on a business trip in Hong Kong, where she ate in a restaurant and gambled in a casino; and had a layover in Chicago, where she visited the airport bar and hooked up in a hotel. Back at home in Minnesota, Beth is jet-lagged, or maybe she has the flu, except neither of those should cause seizures, and neither should kill her. But she dies, and the sooner people figure out why, the better, because Beth was contagious, and there are a lot of people between Hong Kong and Minneapolis. That’s not a spoiler. Beth dies early in the film, and sets the plot in motion. Paltrow is a good casting choice. Killing her early has more of an impact than it would with a lesser-known actress, and the flashbacks of Beth’s trip back to Minneapolis become more meaningful as well. When we see Paltrow, we know we’re getting closer to an answer. Her husband, played by Matt Damon, is in shock, but isn’t sick. He’s helpless, waiting for the go-ahead to take his daughter home.

Various government agents and scientists are on the case immediately. If Beth were contagious, then they need to track down who she came in contact with, and who they came in contact with, and quarantine and test them, and whatever you do, don’t touch your own face. The charge is led by Laurence Fishburne, as a CDC officer, who commands Kate Winslet, who’s out in the field, collecting information, as the body count rises. In a laboratory, Jennifer Ehle and Demitri Martin wear inflated suits and test vaccines. Marion Cottillard is sent to Hong Kong to trace the source of the virus. And yes, I’m aware that Contagion has characters with names. Isn’t it more fun to imagine that if the shit hits the fan, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet will lead us to a cure? On this team of Good Guys, everyone’s good, but Ehle is best. She’s the hero of the movie, if it has one. The bad guys are the bureaucrats who don’t listen to Winslet and Ehle, and the looters who run wild in the streets once the virus knocks out the country’s support system. Bridging the gap between them, and just maybe shining a light on a cure, is Alan Krumwiede (a fake-toothed Jude Law), a whistle-blowing blogger who spends equal time on getting justice for the common man and fame for himself.

For the first time since Traffic, director Steven Soderbergh mixes his two specialties: the low-key social statement, and the cast-of-thousands popcorn movie. Contagion is nerve-racking, dramatic, and political, and also a lot of fun. I cringed and gasped as much Contagion’s casual-contact footage as I do during any horror film. Contagion makes no big deal about it, but once you’ve seen the security footage of Paltrow eating bar nuts and blowing on dice, and heard Winslet’s warnings about touching your face or shaking hands, you’ll be on high alert. Throughout the movie, people cough and then touch public objects, like bus seats or door handles. Soderbergh just keeps the camera moving, with nothing spotlighted or given a second take. Contagion, for all its realistic end-of-days scenarios, is a witty movie. The paranoia and violence in the streets near the film’s climax are reminiscent of zombie movies, and each scene is punctuated by the kind of synth score that usually accompanies characters having more fun, or at least a zippy 1980s’ car chase.

Todd Haynes’s Safe, if you can find it, is a fun follow-up to Contagion. You might think you want Outbreak. You don’t. You might think you want 12 Monkeys. Obviously, you do. But you can’t watch 12 Monkeys every day. Safe is out-of-print at the moment, and it’s not online, and I hate to send you to an actual store to rent a DVD like some kind of caveman, but that might be your only option.

I doubt if anyone ever described Safe as “fun” before. The fun comes from the abandon of the film; Safe came out during the independent movie boon of the 1990s, and is the perfect example of how much the term “independent” has changed. Safe doesn’t have a hip soundtrack, no cute love story, no crime capers or Tarantino rip-offs. It’s weird, off-putting, low-budget, and completely original. It’s the kind of movie a studio wouldn’t make, which is supposedly the point.

Julianne Moore is Carol White, a suburban woman with a beautiful house, happy marriage, lovely friends, and all the comforts modern living affords. She’s pale, soft-spoken, and lately just isn’t feeling one hundred percent. Carol is developing allergies, you see, to aerosol, cleaning products, fabric softener. Regular household items make her weak, short-of-breath. Everyone thinks she’s imagining it, but once her nose starts bleeding, well, you should know by now to take a movie nosebleed seriously.

Carol backtracks away from the hazards of her modern allergies, but can’t seem to get to a place where she feels healthy again. She seeks refuge in sort of a commune, and finds a leader in Chris (James LeGros), but even that only serves to strengthen the argument that maybe Carol just has a rich woman’s problem. Maybe she’s bored, or a hypochondriac. Maybe her environment is using her to make some kind of statement, The Happening-style. Moore has to be seen to be believed in Safe. It’s a precursor to the fragile housewives she played in Far From Heaven and The Hours, but also recalls the creeping towards madness work of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in the 1970s (She also may have had a hand in the way some of us received Natalie Portman’s performance in Black Swan). If Carol is crazy, then she needs instant help; if she’s not, then we all do. Someone alert Kate Winslet, stat.

Contagion: A-

Safe: A