July 24–31, 1997

movie shorts

Contact

The advertising pitch calls Contact "a journey to the heart of the universe," emphasis on heart, with an accompanying poster image of a sorrowful yet noble and serene Jodie Foster gazing into an unknowable distance. Encouraged by her gentle and devoted dad (David Morse), Ellie Arroway (Foster) learns that she must place her faith only in scientific evidence. When Dad dies of cardiac failure, Ellie dedicates herself to waiting for a Message, becoming an astronomer who specializes in listening to sounds from the cosmos. She eventually does receive a message from somewhere near the distant star Vega, a discovery that makes her the object of attention for a series of father-figures, all of whom have designs on the fruits of Ellie's work. Contact's concerns with the larger questions posed by the aliens' apparent invitation are fundamentally fascinating, but repeatedly obscured by its more pressing interests in the dramatic trajectory of Ellie's personal journey. As a result, the film's version of "the heart of the universe" ends up looking a lot like a traditional and disturbingly domestic order. As it insists on visualizing her leap of faith, the film — not unlike Forrest Gump, another film that imagines an insidiously nostalgic universal order — is caught in what ends up being a political bind. And this takes it someplace that's far more mundane than its aspirations to cosmic insights might have produced.

—Cindy Fuchs