Contact (Robert Zemeckis), 1997
An afterword at the end of the late Carl Sagan’s novel Contact notes that it started as a film treatment written in the early 1980s. For several years it was a project for Australian director George Miller, but he jumped ship as the budget skyrocketed. Now, finally, Contact arrives courtesy of Robert Zemeckis and preceded by ecstatic reviews from the US critics.
At the level of plot, the film is reasonably faithful to Sagan’s novel (which I read as a trainee geek back in the late eighties). Young radio astronomer Ellie Arroway (a perfectly cast Jodie Foster) is engaged in a search for radio signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence; she appears to have stalled her career by doing so, but then, dramatically, a message is received. Like most science fiction novels, Sagan’s book was less about story and character (and, in fact, is pretty deficient on both levels): it was an exploration of ideas. Broadly speaking, the ideas that Sagan raise are the same ones that Zemeckis runs with. If a message was received from a superior intelligence, what would it say? And what would the reaction on earth be? What implications would it hold for, say, religious groups?
You have to give Zemeckis and his collaborators credit for tackling such cerebral material, and this certainly marks an enormous progression from last year’s God-awful The Arrival. For that matter, it’s also an improvement on Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump; if Zemeckis is really keen to shift to prestige projects, then this is more like the genuine article. Contact is broad in scope, and has a visual expansiveness that suggests the enormity of its thematic implications. Zemeckis has some bravura moments, including a stunning opening shot and a fiendishly clever sequence that seems to have the camera pointing directly at a mirror. Those moments (and the beautiful sequences showing the workings of the Machine) are genuinely effective and reinforce the story; they help compensate for his more blatantly grandstanding moments, such as the crane shots that pass through windows and the manipulated Bill Clinton news footage. He’s got a top notch supporting cast: Tom Skerritt, James Woods, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, and even Rob Lowe. The only disappointment in his ensemble is the insufferably bland Matthew McConaughey as Foster’s preacher love interest, Palmer Joss; McConaughey takes a poorly written role and runs it into the ground. Foster herself is terrific, mixing feistiness with a lingering, uncertain fragility.
Yet for all Contact‘s virtues – and it is one of the better American films released this year – you still can’t shake that feeling that maybe Zemeckis isn’t smart enough for his material. In an early sequence, the young Ellie is reciting the planets of the solar system. She gets stuck, and her insistence that her father should not help her is supposed to demonstrate both her intelligence and her strong will. Yet she’s old enough that reciting the planets doesn’t seem that amazing a piece of knowledge – any child prodigy worth their salt would be getting stuck on the periodic table, not the planets. It continues like this, with supposedly educated and highly intelligent people exhibiting some strange lapses. Foster’s character has presumably been around university educated people most of her adult life, yet Matthew McConaughey’s character impresses the pants off her (literally) by revealing that he knows what SETI stands for (I could have told her that! Will she sleep with me?). It gets worse – later on, he comments that “Occam’s Razor” sounds like a horror film. In a film that strives so hard to be seen as serious and intelligent, such script details are disconcerting: they reinforce the depressing impression that Zemeckis really did think Forrest Gump was a pretty clever guy.
More seriously, though, they undermine the intelligence of Foster’s character and therefore much of the book’s point. I said before that the film was faithful to the novel at a story level, but Zemeckis and his screenwriters (Michael Goldenberg and James V. Hart) have recast the thematics in a way that betrays of both Sagan and his heroine. The book was strongly agnostic: Ellie has several run-ins with organised religion (represented by Palmer Joss and the more extreme Billy Jo Rankin) and is fairly merciless in her attacks on them. Her arguments are strong and convincing, and Sagan pulls no punches, at one point noting that the Gospels seem to have “cooked the data” in order to prove a prophecy fulfilled. The book concludes with a classic expression of – if I can utilise an apparent contradiction – agnostic religion: the idea that our religions are too small-minded and that there is something bigger than we can know responsible for the universe. (The kind of viewpoint Hamlet nailed so well: “There are more things on heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) In the film, this is recast: the book’s evocative conclusion – which I won’t give away – is dropped, and the agnosticism is completely abandoned. Ellie seems befuddled by even the most glib and simplistic of Joss’s mystical pronouncements, which further undermines the intelligence of the character. Her views on religion are not seen as a legitimate part of her worldview, but rather (as with Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump) a character flaw that she must overcome. I don’t have a problem with religious faith, as such, but I resent the unthinking reverence of Zemeckis’ approach to it, and feel he has betrayed a responsibility to Sagan’s source. The film is dedicated to Sagan, but it would have been more honest a tribute if Zemeckis had provided a faithful adaptation. If Zemeckis couldn’t reconcile this responsibility with his own values (which, judging from Forrest, are deeply conservative) then he should have passed on the project.