July 17, 2010: Contact
Contact (1997) is, on its surface, about the struggle between science and faith, and how the two end up intertwined in the most intriguing ways. However, it ends up also being an effective examination of loneliness and the search for connection. Contact is fairly long, but there’s a lot packed in. I’m going to detail the high and low points of this flawed but fascinating film, but above all from the very first time I saw it and to this day I have to applaud the way this film respects science in a way that Hollywood films rarely do.
I saw Contact upon its initial release and probably haven’t seen it more than once or maybe twice since then, but I’ve always retained the main themes of it in my mind, and I was looking forward to revisiting it, if a little apprehensive about how it has held up. At its core, this is the story of Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), who has been obsessed with deep space and extra-terrestrial life since she was a little girl, and is now a respected scientist who may in fact be discovering the first attempt at contact by otherworldly life forms. The loss of her parents has left her searching the galaxy for forms of life, almost not wanting to allow herself the possibility that somehow somewhere out there, there might be a way for her to contact them. A CGI zoom-out sequence opens the film, emphasizing the vastness of the universe, leading into a maudlin and broadly painted sequence depicting Ellie as a young child. It pushes close to the edge of losing me, but a childhood sequence is admittedly important here and as a director it’s hard to keep from taking short cuts when you really want to move on to the main event. Little details like push pins in a globe for shortwave radio contacts, or the empty branches of deciduous trees at an autumn funeral, speak to me of lazy filmmaking. Mind you, director Robert Zemeckis, noted for the Back to the Future series of films and more importantly the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump just three years before this, was on a roll and didn’t need to worry too much about tightening up his films since he was pretty much writing his own ticket at that time. Anyway, the opening sequence doesn’t detract too much from the finished product, nor do a few Gump-ish scenes with stuff like footage of then-president Bill Clinton doctored to fit into the film’s story. I have to just chalk it up to that period for Zemeckis.
Supporting characters are established, with the compassionate rather than psychopathic version of David Morse as Ellie’s father, Matthew McConaughey as a government contact and romantic interest for her, Tom Skerritt as a competitor in Ellie’s profession, James Woods as a government higher-up, and John Hurt as an eccentric business tycoon who helps Ellie to crack the code. Skerritt and Woods are little more than caricatures, which in my opinion seriously damages the film and at times drags it from reasoned analysis into the typical Hollywood melodrama traps. Performances are solid all around, I just question some of the dramatic choices. I was reminded with the dedication at the end that Contact is adapted from a novel by the at-the-time recently deceased Carl Sagan, who had a hand in the story adaptation but not the screenplay.
At its core, Contact becomes a battle between religion and science. What constitutes “proof”, and is that even what people are looking for? Ellie is a hard-core scientist and thinks that religion and spiritual experiences are bunk, to the point where she cannot bring herself to state a belief in God in front of a congressional panel even though she knows that’s a necessary sacrifice to her integrity in order to continue her journey on a government-sponsored mission. She can’t bring herself to say what they want to hear, and instead needs to say what she feels is her truth. This integrity is admirable, but it leaves her unable to connect with many people in the world, since most don’t live up to her exacting standards. Anyway, following her trip to visit the aliens, if indeed that’s what it was, the tables are turned on her as her claims are met with disbelief because she lacks scientific proof. It’s a profound moment and one which always wins me over because I respect the idea of this theme being flipped on its head. The implementation of this film is seriously flawed but it always gets me on side out of sheer brute force.
Contact doesn’t take the easy way out, and ends up getting things right in the end by allowing for anyone’s interpretation of the world to be valid. One point I struggle with is that for some reason I’ve never been able to decide whether or not the alien contact was real. I don’t know whether that’s a deliberate approach, or another case of me missing some obvious point in the movie which would make it clear. In this case, I’m perfectly happy to leave it as a mystery. (Note: some Wikipedia research reveals that it’s entirely deliberate)
Science vs. faith in Hollywood form.
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