newjerseynewsroom.com

Matt Damon delivers a strong performance

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

The only thing that spreads faster than a virus is fear in Steven Soderbergh's new medical thriller "Contagion."

Both strike like lightning in the opening moments of the movie. Business executive Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) has just flown back from Hong Kong and already made time for hotel-room sex with a man who is (gasp!) not her husband. Perhaps that's why she's sweating.

On another plane, a Japanese executive is feeling poorly. A just returned Ukrainian model looks run down. Meanwhile, back in Kowloon, a handful of people are dropping and convulsing, or wandering into traffic.

Hardly has a video of one victim made the Internet than blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is pitching a conspiracy story to editor Lorraine (Monique Gabriela Curnen) at the San Francisco Chronicle. She is skeptical. That's her mistake.

"Print media is dead!" Alan yells as he exits the newsroom. He's not entirely wrong.

But "Contagion" is a movie where some people are wrong, and more are dead. By the next day, Beth's good-guy husband Mitch will be confronting unimagined tragedies in a strong performance by Matt Damon.

Scott Z. Burns' smart script will briefly revisit the opening scenes in an elegant wrap-up that explains a lot. In the meantime, though, a lot of people with "Doctor" in front of their names try to soldier on while the rest of the world falls apart.

Besides the schadenfreude of seeing stars look as realistically bad as the rest of us, "Contagion" differs from almost everything else out of Hollywood this year by valuing intelligence.

The downside of that is that while most of the many plotlines coalesce into a coherent whole, the large cast gets very little time to make individual impressions. Some characters who initially seem critical, like patient zero Paltrow, quickly fall by the wayside.

Fortunately, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and Jennfier Ehle are up to the task of making lively action from medical research and administration. Along with Damon and young Anna Jacoby-Heron as his daughter, they put flesh on the bones of very svelte story arcs.