July 11, 1997 | Given the abundance of insubstantial sound and fury at the multiplexes during this summer movie season, it’s refreshing to find something as ambitious as Contact. Based on the best-selling novel by the late Carl Sagan, and directed with equal measures of perceptive intelligence and crowd-pleasing showmanship by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump), this is one big-budget blockbuster that might actually spark serious discussions and spirited debates long after the closing credits have drifted by.
That isn’t to say Contact is a great film. But even with its miscalculations and sometimes fuzzy characterizations, it still manages to command respect, sustain interest and provoke thought. For that alone, we should be grateful.
Jodie Foster is extremely well cast as Dr. Eleanor Arroway, an intensely driven astronomer who has devoted her life to proving that human beings are not alone in the cosmos. In flashbacks we see that, as a little girl played by Jena Malone, Arroway gained an appreciation for the possibilities of extraterrestrial life from her schoolteacher father (David Morse), an easygoing fellow who approached the subject with an admirable measure of common sense. In his view, the universe is such a big place that is, if there isn’t life out there, “It seems like an awful waste of space.” Long after her father’s death, Arroway continues to take his words to heart.
Right from the start of Contact, Foster conveys just the right mix of ingenuous girlishness and iron-willed determination. When her disapproving mentor, David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), pulls the plug on her research project at a radio-telescope complex in Puerto Rico, Arroway takes it upon herself to obtain private funding to continue her work. Her zealous enthusiasm greatly impresses S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), a reclusive billionaire entrepreneur who senses in her a kindred spirit. Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a defrocked priest who wanders the globe as a kind of free-lance religious philosopher, is even more impressed. He enjoys a tender one-night stand with Arroway during her short-lived stint in Puerto Rico. Years later, after Joss has become a most unlikely presidential adviser and Arroway has announced a stunning breakthrough in her work, he continues to be impressed. And, yes, not a little concerned for her safety.
With Hadden’s financial assistance, Arroway finally does receive a radio transmission from a distant star. It takes some doing, but she and her assistants decode the message, and discover that it contains, among other things, blueprints for a machine capable of transporting its passenger to deep space. And that’s when Arroway’s troubles really begin.
Working from a screenplay by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, Zemeckis does a smart and sharply satirical job of showing how Arroway inadvertently ignites a firestorm of controversy. Michael Kitz (James Woods), a hard-charging National Security Adviser, fears the extraterrestrials may have ulterior motives, and tries to commandeer Arroway’s project for the U.S. military. (The transportation device, he claims, may really be a high-tech bomb of some sort.) David Drumlin, formerly a die-hard skeptic, quickly embraces the new evidence of extraterrestrial life — and jockeys to elbow Arroway out of her rightful place as the first passenger aboard the spacecraft. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of deeply religious folks demand to know if those creatures out there believe in God. More to the point, they also question whether a self-confessed agnostic like Arroway should represent Earthlings in the first close encounter in outer space.
Zemeckis juggles many different ideas and their ramifications in Contact. He also pays close attention to scientific details, and even has some fun with them. For example, during the opening minutes of the movie, Zemeckis uses a remarkable montage of sound bites to illustrate how radio signals from Earth have drifted out to the depths of space ever since — well, ever since radio broadcasts began. Later in Contact, he makes darkly ironic use of a 1930s television broadcast that, unfortunately, also has reached the extraterrestrials.
But as Zemeckis labors mightily to consider all the possibilities — to offer a plausible dramatization of what might happen if such fantastic events really took place — many of his characters get lost in the shuffle. This is particularly true in the case of Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss, who disappears for long sections of the film, and isn’t clearly defined even when he is on screen. (Try to image a cross between a New Age mystic and a younger, hipper and randier Billy Graham.) As S.R. Hadden, John Hurt is stuck with playing not a role but a plot device — every so often, he magically reappears to help Arroway out of a tough spot.
Thanks to the miracle of trick photography, the same sort of razzle-dazzle he used in Forrest Gump to place Tom Hanks’ title character among real-life figures, Zemeckis is able to add no less a figure than President Bill Clinton to his cast of characters. To be sure, Clinton doesn’t have a large role in the drama. But he makes more of an impact with his fleeting appearances than Rob Lowe, whose role as the leader of a conservative religious coalition is thin to the point of transparency. (Maybe there’s more to the character on Zemeckis’ cutting-room floor.) James Wood’s Michael Kitz doesn’t have a lot of depth, either, but Woods is able to grab attention through sheer force of his commandingly nasty screen presence. Skerritt does something similar as David Drumlin, but in a much subtler and sneakier fashion.
It wouldn’t be fair to reveal too many details about the climactic encounter between Foster’s inquisitive astronomer and the highly advanced extraterrestrials. Suffice it to say that, while Zemeckis obviously looked to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for inspiration, he makes skillful use of special-effects technology far more sophisticated than the movie magic that was available to Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg for their sci-fi masterworks. Contact doesn’t quite manage to generate the same sort of emotional rush — the same kind of joyous epiphany — as those two earlier films. But, then again, Zemeckis is dealing with a ’90s audience that is more cynical about epiphanies, joyous or otherwise, and much more jaded when it comes to flashy displays of special effects. Maybe, as moviegoers, we are no longer innocent enough to be easily transported to a state of childlike wonder, even when an exceptionally talented is doing his best to take us there.
