On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen SAGAN GUMPED By Raphael Shargel Ellie Arroway does not believe in God, but she has an abiding faith in radio. Her father, who encouraged her love for electronics, died when she...
...Contact purports to take its protagonist on a spiritual journey, bringing her to a larger understanding of the universe and the role humanity should play in it...
...Her desire to speak with creatures who might answer her deepest metaphysical questions has become an obsession...
...Contact takes such a simplistic view of religion and science that it forgets both do more than simply explain the function of the universe...
...In Contact the Clinton footage (including excerpts from a speech he made after scientists speculated about life on Mars) is so deftly interwoven, it seems as if the President is appearing in the movie on his own initiative...
...Wlien she does pick up a cosmic message urging humans to visit an alien world, she keeps a cool head amid peers who panic...
...She is the director of Project Argus, an enormous astronomy research foundation that devotes 75 per cent of its telescope time to eavesdropping on the stars...
...Should we build more radio telescopes...
...In the novel Ellie at least has a task to perform...
...In the middle section, the two debate the value of science and religion...
...Billionaire Haddon does not hold her future in his hands...
...Nor is Ellie forced to beg for a grant in the novel...
...As an adult, Ellie is still desperate to communicate with a world beyond our own...
...She is instructed by the alien she meets to look at the results of certain mathematical formulas for patterned sequences of numbers...
...By contrast, Zemeckis' says little about his people...
...When Dee Dee Myers and Geraldine Ferraro, for example, appear "as themselves" alongside Larry King and Bernard Shaw and read scripted lines about our imminent contact with aliens from outer space, they compromise the credibility they have at other times claimed...
...Small wonder, then, that both the Hollywood establishment and conservative Republicans praised Forrest Gump as a superb expression of their values...
...Ellie is not a maverick...
...After the funeral, Ellie ran to her room, turned on the set he had taught her to use, and scoured the airwaves, calling him to return...
...While passionate about science, she is a thoughtful intellectual who approaches all ideas, including her own, with healthy skepticism...
...Diminishing the considerable authority and independence that Sagan gave his heroine also mutes the author's manifest confidence that reason can triumph in a world where cowardice and superstition too often prevail...
...Joss takes Ellie to bed early in the film, then reappears, incredibly, as a Christian fundamentalist preacher and spiritual guide...
...Where Sagan's Ellie discovers the presence of the divine within a proof that has nothing to do with her, the film never goes beyond the fulfillment of self...
...Leaving a Congressional hearing with the approving Joss at her side, Ellie is still committed to a story she cannot prove to be true, yet seems to have joined the ranks of the faithful...
...Her father, who encouraged her love for electronics, died when she was eight, leaving her an orphan...
...she has a gift for playing the wounded and driven...
...Forrest Gump, Zemeckis' most celebrated hero, had an I.Q...
...We learn that Elite's interrogators have conclusive evidence that she made her journey, but with the unexplained secretiveness that possesses high officials in every science fiction film, they have chosen to keep the information from the public...
...His recent movies are photographed with a sweeping grandiosity calculated to fill audiences with awe...
...The movie is based on a novel by the late Carl Sagan, and even though Zemeckis consulted with him shortly before his death, the adaptation deviates from its source in significant and disturbing ways...
...Ellie insists ideas have meaning only when supported by empirical evidence...
...Ellie feels that she has come full circle, that the very rationalism she used to attack Joss has discredited her in the eyes of the world...
...Although she demonstrated against the Vietnam War and fought for women's liberation, her dissolute life brought her nothing but misery and in the end she died of AIDS...
...Since she brings back no proof of her experience, both the government and the scientific community refuse to believe her testimony...
...Zemeckis, deeply cynical about the transformative power of human will, is the director of the status quo...
...It stressed that fate rewards the good soldier and punishes the bad...
...By sheer accident he became a war hero, a multimillionaire and a cultural icon honored by three Presidents...
...It encouraged its audience to be accepting and obedient, to follow the paths the powerful have marked for them and trust in dumb luck for their happiness...
...of 75...
...Because the movie has made the death of the father the driving force of Ellie's ambition, the reunion serves as a total validation of her efforts...
...This is the premise of Contact, the latest film from Robert Zemeckis, who won an Oscar for directing Forrest Gump...
...This is evident from the impressive opening sequence, in which the camera looks down upon the Earth and then tracks back through the solar system and the galaxies beyond only to dissolve into a shot of young Ellie's eye...
...he is an inventor she confers with who later pleads for permission to finance the construction of a spacecraft...
...Those movies dramatized his frenzied efforts to return history to its original state...
...He has long been pessimistic about people's ability to control their destinies...
...He began his professional career making films for Steven Spielberg, and both Forrest Gump and Contact prove that he has mastered the Spielberg touch...
...Those who know Zemeckis' previous works should not be surprised by the profound way he has changed the novel's thrust...
...Neither Zemeckis nor Sagan mention that religion also instructs its adherents to follow a code of behavior...
...Clinton is an unwilling participant...
...He was a well-meaning idiot, passive and unimaginative, capable only of following the orders of others...
...Assuring its viewers that the truest spirituality resides inside the self, Contact preaches solipsism as the road to enlightenment...
...In the interest of fleshing out the character, though, Zemeckis has transformed a respected, intelligent, cleareyed woman who holds her own in a field dominated by men into an impulsive creature who is manipulated by them...
...She converses with a being from a superior culture that watches and guides our own...
...During a meeting with representatives of eccentric billionaire S. R. Haddon, Ellie begs so fervently for a grant that she nearly breaks down...
...Joss claims he knows God intuitively...
...Sagan's extraterrestrial tells Ellie a great deal about how his culture functions...
...Most important, Sagan's Ellie does not believe that the stars can compensate for the death of her father...
...She has become a brilliant astronomer bent on making contact with extraterrestrials...
...Like Gump, Contact affirms that it is difficult to follow the heart, but promises that if we do, its truth will never lead us astray...
...The cosmos Zemeckis' heroine discovers satisfies all of her ambitions and desires...
...That is not the case, however, with the CNN reporters and commentators we see, who shouldhangtheirheads in shame...
...In the movie, Ellie testifies before the government committee that she has been given the opportunity to see how small and precious we are, but her newfound spirituality begins and ends with that revelation...
...It is never clear what she or the aliens expect us to do with this knowledge...
...Elite's awakening is overseen by Palmer Joss (who, with her father, is one of the film's nurturing men...
...When the time-traveling hero of the three Back to the Future films accidentally altered his past, he created a nightmarish present...
...Perhaps Zemeckis thinks these cameos will add weight and seriousness to the grand theme of his move...
...Construct more spaceships...
...Yet Sagan, a scientist by trade, did not have the novelist's talent for creating rounded, sympathetic characters...
...But themainstream scientific community, doubting that space aliens exist, refuses to fund her project...
...Zemeckis manufactures a final twist, however, that undermines Elite's conversion...
...The film is already notorious for its unauthorized use of President Bill Clinton's image...
...On the book's last page she finds one such pattern and believes it to be the mark of a cosmic intelligence she might be content to call God...
...In general, his movies reward those who are happy with their lot and punish those who strive for something else...
...A paternalistic and patronizing figure, he directly contradicts his counterpart in the novel by advising Ellie not to question him too deeply, implying that merely by taking the path that has led her to him, she has already transformed the earth...
...Later Ellie, by the grace of Haddon, journeys to a distant planet...
...Enlarging on her childhood impulses, she develops a plan to point powerful radio telescopes at the heavens in the hope of detecting transmissions from otherplanets...
...And his choosing Jodie Foster for the role is inspired...
...Zemeckis is right to give the film's Ellie some vulnerability...
...In the novel as well as the movie, the alien appears to Ellie not in his own form but in the guise of her father...
...If we do, what will we gain...
...In the book, the search for intelligent life in outer space is a legitimate endeavor...
...When Forrest Gump seemed to be shaking hands with Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, you could deduce that Zemeckis and his team of technical wizards had miraculously transported actor Tom Hanks into old news video...
...This visual language lets on that Contact is a fantasy, except that Zemeckis raises doubts by casting famous public figures in small roles...
...Zemeckis contrasted Gump's fortunes with those of his sweetheart, a thoughtful radical who tried to change her world...
...He spends most of his time congratulating Ellie for reaching him...
...In the end, Ellie, the government and especially the audience are encouraged to see God as an abstraction and science as a theory that falls short of truth while indulging the fantasy that friendly aliens are hovering above us, benevolently guiding our destiny...
...It maintains that the pulse of the cosmos beats within each of us, that the individual soul contains the soul of the universe...
Vol. 80 • August 1997 • No. 13
