Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

Steven Soderbergh's eerie 'Contagion' and Vera Farmiga's thoughtful 'Higher Ground' kick off fall season on a high note.

It’s refreshing to see that films aimed at adults are still being made following a summer chock full of movies with product tie-ins. In fact, the only item that audiences exiting Steven Soderbergh’s latest film might consider buying is hand sanitizer.

“Contagion” is a chilly, disturbing thriller in which the director incorporates the multi-character storytelling format from his critically acclaimed “Traffic” to paint a startlingly realistic portrayal of a society gone mad amid the spread of a deadly communicable disease.

The picture is eerily effective and most of the characters’ individual stories are grounded in the realm of possibility.

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

At the film’s beginning, a woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) returning home to Minnesota from a trip to Hong Kong becomes violently ill, while several others across the globe display similar symptoms. The airborne illness begins to spread quickly, causing a variety of characters at various levels of government to become involved.

Thrown into the mix are the sick woman’s husband (a sympathetic Matt Damon), an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor sent out into the field (Kate Winslet), several researchers attempting to find an antidote (Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin and a scene stealing Jennifer Ehle), a World Health Organization worker investigating how the disease spread (Marion Cotillard) and a blogger (Jude Law) who uses panic caused by the virus’s spread to his advantage. 

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The disease spreads across several continents and claims millions of lives. It is at this point that Soderbergh’s film takes an even darker turn. Stores are looted. People fight over dwindling grocery supplies. In the film’s most chilling sequence, Damon watches out his window as two armed men rob and shoot a neighbor in the middle of the night.

It is difficult to craft an entire film in which the villains, so to speak, are germs. So, Law’s blogger, who advocates for an untested holistic cure in order to draw visitors to his website, stands in as the movie’s sole character of sinister intentions.

It is fear itself, however, that drives Soderbergh’s narrative. And what makes the film such a squirm inducing experience is its realistic docudrama approach to a scenario that does not feel far-removed from reality.

“Higher Ground” is a rare recent example of a film that explores controversial subject matter in a thoughtful, measured manner. In this case, that subject is the evangelical Christian movement.

Actress Vera Farmiga (“Up In the Air”) does double duty as the film’s director and lead character. The picture is one of the most self-assured debuts of recent memory.

Set in the 1970s, the story begins with Corinne’s childhood and teenage years as she listens to screaming matches between her alcoholic father (John Hawkes) and no-nonsense mother.

She falls for a musician, becomes pregnant and is married before even finishing high school. The lives of Corrine, her husband (Joshua Leonard) and daughter are spared during a car crash and the road to religion is paved for the young family.

Corrine and her husband join an evangelical church made up primarily of couples that appear to have abandoned the peace movement of the late 1960s.

But over the course of a decade, Corrine begins to question her faith and is dismayed at the church’s male hierarchy. Her marriage begins to fall apart and she becomes alienated from her fellow believers.

And yet, “Higher Ground” is neither a religious story nor an anti-faith film. Even as Corrine’s faith in her church begins to dwindle, she still craves the need for a spiritual presence. She begs God to communicate with her and envies her best friend’s (a wonderful Dagmara Dominczyk) ability to speak in tongues.

Much like Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” Farmiga’s film provides no definitive answers from its filmmakers on the question of religion. But that they are even asking the question makes them both stand out in a cinematic year mostly devoid of curiosity or ambiguity. 


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Bayside-Douglaston