Bird flu movie just runs a low-grade temperature

ABC’s sweeps-month “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America” hits the air tonight, serendipitously preceded by what might be called a White House unpreparedness report. And though it comes equipped with an introductory title card designed to head off panic in the streets and calls from chicken ranchers -- noting that only 125 people have died of bird flu, that humans don’t spread it yet, that you won’t get sick from eating properly prepared poultry and, of course, that experts disagree -- its makers would still like you to be very afraid. But it will help if you already are.

Bathed throughout in a digital blue light that is the new cinematic shorthand for seriousness -- from first scene to last no one so much as cracks a joke -- the film tosses around facts and figures and tries for the most part to make its characters act as people do. But its eventual slide into cornpone and melodrama -- the level that such material naturally wants to seek -- is the worse for being so halfheartedly embraced. I admire the producers’ decision to not go all Charlton Heston with this, yet they have still made what is, in spite of the docudramatic veneer, a disaster film (social chaos, plucky survivors, essentially hopeful) crossed with a horror movie (mortal bodies fatally altered by contagion, fundamentally unsettling). Just a dull one.

Notwithstanding a little coughed-up blood and an autopsy, the film is oddly sanitary and mild, keeping the chaos at arm’s length and being careful not to offend anyone whom a commercial network with a license from the FCC might not want to offend -- which not only makes for a bad disaster or horror film but is actually a poor reflection of reality. Your Government is all earnest goodwill here, but you only have to cast back to a little hurricane called Katrina to remember the pontificating, finger-pointing and petulant complaint that erupts at such times. (One governor in the film notes that since Katrina, “we’ve updated our emergency response plans,” and I got a chuckle out of that.) Only the French, still the easy target of choice, are kicked, loath as they are to share a vaccine they discover. (America decides to violate the patent and make it themselves -- just imagine what GlaxoSmithKline PLC would have to say to its friends in Washington were the situation reversed.)

Barring a big-screen special effects and locations budget, of course, there is no way that a little TV movie, even one from a network owned by Disney, can put on a convincing impersonation of a global pandemic. There are a few Big Scenes, or shots, really -- one perhaps purposely recalling the scene in “Gone With the Wind” where the Confederate wounded have been laid out at a train station -- but mostly it’s a few people in small rooms talking about big events elsewhere. “What about the violence we’ve been seeing around the country?” someone asks at a news conference. Yes, well, what about it?

As usual a few stories tell the whole. Joely Richardson plays a hotshot member of the amusingly named Epidemic Intelligence Service. (Now that’s an epidemic I’d like to see.) We see enough of her personal life to learn that she doesn’t have one -- she has, you know, sex, but once she buttons up she stays appropriately buttoned. Stacy Keach, as the secretary of Health and Human Services, personifies responsible government, and Scott Cohen, as the governor of Virginia, less responsible government -- his strategy is to seal himself in an airtight bunker and to quarantine affected neighborhoods behind cyclone fences and razor wire. The president is unseen, and that is realistic enough. Anne Cusack, whom I have admired elsewhere, plays the widow of patient zero. Only Justina Machado (“Six Feet Under”), as a New York City nurse, transcends the material -- it’s a warm, rooted performance.

In the end, as in “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno,” the people of America, if not the rest of the unseen world, learn that the only way to pull through is to pull together.

“We have to take care of each other,” Richardson says to Cohen before he leaves his bunker to roll up his sleeves like Bobby Kennedy. That is the lesson of “Fatal Contact,” though the one to remember is this: WASH YOUR HANDS.

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‘Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America’

Where: ABC

When: 8 to 10 tonight

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)