Over a black screen we hear coughing. In the next five minutes, we will jump from city to city as a mystery virus grip its first hosts, and watch Gwyneth Paltrow seizure and foam, becoming the virus’s first victim. These early scenes illustrate how inconsequential human existence will be considered in this film. And Soderbergh doesn’t flinch. He’s never been one to.

This plague begins in Hong Kong with Paltrow and moves to Minnesota as she returns home from a business trip. Within hours, she begins having signs of delirium and begins entering a coma before dying unexpectedly in the hospital. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is in shock. In a scene that is an astounding testament to Damon’s power as an actor, a doctor breaks the news, quite bluntly, to Mitch that his wife had died. Paralyzing shock overcomes him, and anger soon fills him. What happened to her? This is all he can think. An ordinary actor would play our heartstrings like a fiddle, but not Damon. He, like Soderbergh, knows that we need not be milked for tears or empathy. And so we continue to hop around the world, at a tightly-edited and exhilarating pace set to a droning electronic score. We focus on people from CDC officials played by Lawrence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and Marion Cotillard, to Jude Law’s conspiracy blogger (all in top form), to the plight of Damon and his daughter in wintertime Minnesota. As the situations become more desperate, we catch glimpses of the most primal aspects of human nature and morality.

Written by Scott Z. Burns, whose previous credits include The Bourne Ultimatum and Soderbergh’s own The Informant!, the screenplay is in essence a procedural. It’s very chronological and has a straight forward, step-by-step process. And that’s precisely what a film like this needs. No unnecessary exposition, no melodramatic character arcs, no scenes of world leaders or iconic landmarks. This is about a virus and the futility of society, not of the specifics of infrastructure. Just small-time, by the books horror and paranoia.

A chilling sense of despondency pervades the whole picture. Soderbergh’s detached, objective, almost documentarian approach to the material in fact heightens the emotion at hand. Mr. Soderbergh understands that if there is a truly human story present such as this, the heartbreak, horror, and tragedy of it all will come without aid. He frames the film with a myriad of oddly angled shots. The frame almost seems to hang in the air, uncaring of what its focus is. It is almost as if he has a mentality of, If the actor just so happens to become the focus of this beautiful, shallow canvas I’ve painted, that’s cool. If not, fuck it. I don’t mean to be vulgar, but I’ve never thought of Soderbergh as one to mince words. But that’s how it seems to be. He uses a cold approach to filming the action. Rather than focusing on the action itself, Mr. Soderbergh, keeping a steady hand, hones in on the emotional punch through lack of emotion. Contagion is mostly definitely in the ranks of Traffic, his finest work.

Contagion seems to be over in a quick whirlwind of existential-soaked anguish. In a mere 90 minutes, we witness sights of hysteria and mass graves, and the world nor the camera bat an eye as reconstruction begins. The picture ponders not necessarily meaningless of life, but rather accepts it and illustrates this fact with clarity and a rather stern and surreal brilliance.

A man, submerged and naked and blue, struggles for a gasp of life at the surface of an endless water. This is how Tom Ford’s 2009 film A Single Man begins, and it signifies that throughout this film, we will see this man continue to struggle. This man is Brit-trapped-in-1960s-LA George Falconer (Colin Firth in perfect form), and he is suffering from a loss.

It is the loss of his lover, Jim (played by a haunting Matthew Goode). For nearly 15 years, these two men lived their lives together. They were each other’s best friend, each other’s world. So when Jim dies in a fatal car accident, George’s world is shattered. He walks through life numb, a shell of a man. We follow George on his last day on this Earth. Throughout this day, we witness him make preparations for his departure of his own volition. The strain of life without Jim has become too much, and he no longer has the will to live. This is to not say, though, that this is a depressing film. In fact, despite its overtly sad themes, it’s a film filled with humane beauty and passion.

Tom Ford is the current creative director of Gucci and has been for the past nearly twenty years. And all of these years, he has been forming a master director’s aesthetic in his mind that is something to be awed at. His vise-like grip and understanding of filmmaking is quite apparent. Except during flashbacks, Mr. Ford maintains a steady hand throughout the picture. Virtually no handheld is used except for a few key shots. He consistently utilizes dolly tracking, steadicam, and even fixed shots, simply relying upon a quick pan to get his point across. Mr. Ford uses moments of slow-motion photography to capture the simple beauties that George is just now seeing in his final hours. During these brief - almost fleeting - glances at things like the color of a pretty girl’s eyes, the scarlet shimmer of a rose or whimsical smoke leaving a man’s mouth, the typically subdued saturation of the cinematography livens and shivers into the brightest and most stunning examples of color. These images rip the breath from your lungs and stimulate the mind with the purest of visuals. It is for these reasons that Tom Ford, with only one film, has proven himself a directorial force of nature and a talent to be watched.

Equally as impressive are his screenwriting abilities. Adapting his screenplay from an obscure 1964 British novel by Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Ford cuts and adds just where it is needed. The dialogue is concise and somewhat simple, yet it is never droll or lacking in cleverness. He knows that the audience doesn’t need to be milked for tears or have their heartstrings pulled too hard. He allows moments of flattening sadness to sink in only for a moment and then they’re gone, just like George’s day. It would seem that Mr. Ford is trying to keep the viewer in the same mindset as George: “Just get through the damned day.” But the writing, cinematography, and direction are so exquisitely rendered that we wish this day of melancholy beauty would never end. 

Now, the performance here by Colin Firth must be addressed. For it he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor the year before he actually won the award for The King’s Speech. But, for me at least, this film stands as Firth’s finest achievement to date. He plays George as a man of broken spirit but not of broken dignity. He is apparently a classic British gentleman who has been raised to not let his anguish show, but try as he may, Firth’s eyes tell the whole story. It’s really quite remarkable that Firth can take this role, seemingly just a depressed man on the page, and turn it into a devastatingly human performance filled with longing and aching, and surprising wit and humor. He turns what could have been an dreadful exercise in depression into what is essentially an examination of the human condition and the level of emotional blows one person can take. At no point does he break down and sob like so many actors would have resorted to. Because Mr. Firth is better than that. A Single Man reminds one of precisely why he is considered one of our finest modern actors. We’re not just watching a character; we’re watching a fully-rounded person. To put it simply, it’s a pleasure to watch such a professional dominate his craft.

That’s not to say, though, that Firth’s performance here is the only standout. Julianne Moore has a small but excellent role as Charley, one of George’s old friends who came with him from England to Los Angeles. Obvious to us and George himself, Charley has been in love with him for longer than she can remember. Yes, they once had somewhat romantic relations but that was years ago, George keeps reminding her. He loves Jim and only Jim. Ms. Moore delivers a maelstrom performance of anger, self-doubt and –hate, and resentment for George’s homosexuality. It’s a powerhouse. 

Matthew Goode, probably most widely known for his role in Watchmen, plays Jim, George’s charming companion, in flashbacks. He most likely has a total of 5 minutes on screen, but he makes every one of those seconds count. What is astonishing is the chemistry between Firth and Goode. We fully believe that these two men love each other more than anything else in this world, and we understand why George loved and still loves him. He’s intelligent and charming and caring and insightful. Goode’s haunting performance makes us as the audience almost miss him as much as George. I also have to address that this film has some of the tenderest scenes of love between two homosexual men that have been portrayed on screen. It seems that in this day and age, the sex factor of homosexuality is so up-played that we forget that it is first and foremost about love and a human connection. At no point are George and Jim shown in moments of “gay lust”. Instead, we simply see them sitting in a den together reading or sitting and talking on a sun-drenched beach.  Not since Ang Lee’s masterpiece Brokeback Mountain or Gus van Sants’s Milk have homosexuals been so delicately shown truly caring for one another in a loving sense, not a sexual one. And for that, I must give Tom Ford’s screenplay even more praise, he himself being a homosexual. 

A Single Man isn’t a film about depression like it so easily could have been. It is rather an exploration of what exactly makes us what we are. It’s about searching out and finding beauty even in the darkest and most crushing of times. It begs us to, even in our lowest states, to never stop giving love and never prevent ourselves from receiving it. A Single Man is a criminally underrated film. It takes your breath away and makes it difficult to regain it. It pours an exhilarating mix of melancholy, joy, depression, and hope into the mind and heart, and it was the best film of 2009. Tom Ford has undeniably created a thing of heart-stopping beauty.

-SJC