director
Robert
Zemeckis
screenwriters
James V. Hart
Michael Goldenberg
based on
the novel by
Carl Sagan
producers
Steve Starkey
Robert Zemeckis
cinematographer
Don Burgess
music
Alan Silvestri
editor
Arthur Schmidt
cast
Jodie Foster (Ellie Arroway)
Matthew McConaughey (Palmer Joss)
David Morse (Ted Arroway)
William Fichtner (Kent)
Tom Skerritt (David Drumlin)
Jake Busey (Joseph)
James Woods (Michael Kitz)
Angela Bassett (Rachel Constantine)
John Hurt (S.R. Hadden)
Jena Malone (Young Ellie)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 153m
u.s.
release: 7/11/97
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other robert
zemeckis films
reviewed on this website:
- cast
away
- forrest gump
- what lies beneath
|
I
wonder when exactly it was that Robert Zemeckis became a mass-audience
healer, dedicated to our enlightenment and improvement. This,
after all, is the man who gave us that hilarious ode to insincerity
Used Cars ("You know, Mrs. Lopez, the color of your
hair matches the color of these tires"). And even as recently
as 1992 he made the memorably nasty Death Becomes Her
-- whose box-office failure may explain Zemeckis' hard left turn
into Serious Major Motion Pictures.
In Contact, as in his inescapable Forrest
Gump, Robert Zemeckis tucks us in with an inspirational
bedtime story. Both movies are fit for inclusion in William Bennett's
Book of Virtues; they're companion pieces, really -- Gump
toured America's past, while Contact turns its eyes to
the future. And both movies have matching strengths and weaknesses.
I actually liked Gump before it stopped being a movie
and started being a pop-culture religion; I enjoyed its narrative
sweep, its satisfying big-movie aura, and the same qualities
kept me interested in Contact.
The movie is based on a novel by the late Carl Sagan, an enthusiastic
scientist and thinker who was also a tad full of himself, as
anyone who watched him on PBS' Cosmos can attest. Contact
is full of itself, too -- swollen with hefty talk best left to
college students lazing around a bong. Who are we? Why are we
here? What is our destiny? Like, wow, man. The movie is
like an extremely literal-minded answer to 2001, which
hid maddening questions inside the folds of its narcotic mysticism.
Contact poses questions only to provide its own warm and
fuzzy answers. The universe is like a box of chocolates.
Acting for the first time since the awful Nell
in 1994, Jodie Foster is once again alert and grounded, which
is the best news about Contact. She's Ellie Arroway, a
brilliant young astronomer driven to find a way to chat with
whatever might be Out There. A skeptic and passionate scientist,
she doesn't believe in God but does believe we're not alone;
she's Mulder and Scully rolled into one -- she, too, wants to
believe. And that, I'm afraid, turns out to be the emphasis of
Contact. We've lost ourselves! We need faith in something
-- anything!
Much of Contact unfolds in an anticipatory hush that's
most welcome in this loud summer. The astrologers wait for a
sign from the skies. They wait to figure out what the signal
means. They wait for word from the White House. They wait to
see who will be picked to go up in a spacecraft whose design
has been encoded in the signals. Waiting and more waiting. Yet
the movie isn't boring. Zemeckis still has superb, assured control
of his filmmaking, if not his choice of material.
Contact yearns for a marriage of science and religion.
The devotees gathering to await alien contact are like the Gump
acolytes jogging across America, and Ellie becomes a Gump for
Roswell junkies. After her trip through space, everyone thinks
she hallucinated it, and her skepticism is thrown back at her.
She can't prove what she saw; it's like God -- you just have
to believe. Zemeckis is telling us that the color of our souls
matches the color of the cosmos. He's selling us used pieties. |