Fetal Attraction
Everyone knows that aliens
look like giant fetuses. Just think of Roswell, N.M., or the glowing eggheads
in Close Encounters of the Third Kind . But in Contact , the
closest thing to a fetus is the adult woman who's tracking the aliens down.
She's Ellie (Jodie Foster), a brilliant, idealistic scientist who, when things
go wrong, hugs her knees to her chest. She's been searching for signs of
extraterrestrial life ever since she was a little girl. Why? Because her mother
died in childbirth, and a few years later her father died of a heart attack.
Now, in her loneliness, she spends day and night listening for signals from
little green men. She knows that when she finds them, they'll be sweet and
loving and helpful, like the parents she never had.
Robert
Zemeckis ought to have been the ideal director for this film. After all, he's
the leading explorer of the child in American adults. In the goofy Back
to
the Future , he regressed Michael J. Fox to a 1950s high-school
student and had him strike up an incestuous flirtation with his then teen-age
mother. In the whimsical-ponderous epic Forrest Gump , Zemeckis made a
saint out of a simpleton who was essentially a 5-year-old in a man's body.
Contact opens in much the same vein, with a series of calm, loving,
emblematic scenes from childhood. Ellie's white clapboard house even looks
suspiciously like Forrest's house, even though she's from Wisconsin and he
lived in Alabama.
So fond of iconic childhood is Zemeckis, in fact, that he
takes a good half hour to inch toward anything that looks like a plot. Ellie
finally grows up to run a facility in New Mexico that listens for signals from
outer space, and one day, as she's sitting in the desert, her headphones pick
up a noise. Instantly, she knows it's aliens (the audience could be excused for
thinking it sounds like a garbage truck backing up). With remarkable speed, she
and her team figure out that the noise is actually a code, a blueprint for a
machine to carry a human being to the faraway solar system of Vega. The
government casually comes up with half a trillion dollars to build it, and in
what seems like a weekend, a launching pad as big as a mountain is ready to
go.
But before
she can fly to Vega, Ellie has to face down some earthly obstacles. There's a
selfish scientist (Tom Skerritt) trying to take credit for her discoveries, and
a national security adviser (James Woods) scheming to be elected to Congress.
There's also a contest to see who'll get to fly the machine. Of course, by now
we know that Ellie's lonely childhood has given her a unique gift for
listening, and that she's the only one who can go to Vega, and that everything
that happens up until her trip is a mere distraction. Even Zemeckis seems
impatient to get to the magic; throughout the middle of this movie he simply
checks out, like the directorial equivalent of a deadbeat dad. This is
unfortunate, because in his negligence he has allowed into his film dialogue
(by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, based on Carl Sagan's novel) that
falls far beneath the standards of your average corporate memo. Tearfully,
Ellie announces that her discovery represents "a profoundly impactful moment
for humanity." Matthew McConaughey--who plays Ellie's love interest, the
ridiculously named Palmer Joss, a former priest who is now the respected author
of a best-selling book about "faith" and "meaning," and who, though still in
his 20s, is a trusted adviser to the president--thrusts out his lower jaw like
a calendar pinup while delivering such lines as "I'm not against technology,
I'm against the men who deify it at the expense of human truth!" Charlton
Heston couldn't have said it better.
Occasionally, Zemeckis stops nodding off and
sprinkles in some flashy Gumpian touches. Refining Gump 's mix of real
and fictional footage, he makes truly shameless use of two long clips from
Clinton press conferences, and invites hordes of journalists to stop by for
cameos. Talk about self-plagiarism. What we're waiting for is the trip to Vega,
and indeed, this 10-minute sequence turns out to be pure joy. Ellie gets
strapped into a metal ball and hurtles through a tunnel of space. Instead of
the massive, gray, meticulously detailed sci-fi city we've come to expect, she
floats through weird, puddly red and blue atmospheres. She speeds up and slows
down, and she has no idea why. She reaches out to touch the wall of the machine
and it ripples, the way the highway seems to flutter on a hot day. The scene is
grave, scary, and beautiful. It dawns on us that she's heading into something
completely unknown, something she can't even fully perceive. Also, that for the
first time in the movie, Jodie Foster is getting to act.
Then she
lands on the alien planet, and the pat speechifying takes up where it left off.
I won't reveal the details of her encounter with the aliens except to say that
they are most un-fetuslike--in fact, they distinctly resemble parents. Could
market research be to blame? Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out
20 years ago, when the audience largely consisted of trail-end baby boomers
likely to groove to Richard Dreyfuss' desire to throw off the shackles of
adulthood and play. Contact comes out at a time when we're obsessed with
role models, and nurturing, and making sure our children grow up to be healthy,
responsible adults. Alas, this is not the premise of a great movie. When
Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and
emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering.
On a brighter note, Shall We Dance? is being hyped
as a throwaway feel-good movie, but it has moments of genuine depth. At first I
resisted the plot, which has a depressed Japanese accountant secretly attending
dance lessons. Haven't we had enough of dance as therapy? Besides, it's stocked
with factory-made eccentrics. There's your requisite bawdy spinster, and the
co-worker who's a systems analyst by day and a wig-wearing rumba dancer by
night.
What the
movie does have going for it is an amazingly moving performance by Koji
Yakusho, the actor who plays the accountant. He's a handsome but humble
Everyman--a Japanese Joel McCrea. Another strength of the film is that its
surprises have little to do with the plot. They occur at random, whenever one
character discovers that another character has feelings. The accountant starts
dancing because he has a crush on his frail, beautiful teacher, and for much of
the movie we watch her through his longing eyes. But quite late in the day, she
reveals a cluster of emotions we couldn't have guessed at--she is, for example,
deeply absorbed in her failure to win a quick-step contest. And she, too, has
to correct a few unfair assumptions about him.
Abrupt shifts in sympathy like this result in
choppy filmmaking . Shall We Dance? has neither the style of Strictly
Ballroom nor the cheap catharsis of Dirty
Dancing . But the
clunkiness is director Masayuki Suo's way of stopping to make sure that he's
emotionally accurate. Shall We Dance? isn't quite art, and it doesn't
qualify as mass entertainment either. But it's alert to its characters'
constantly evolving desires in ways that high- and low-culture movies, with
their strict aesthetics or their mass-market formulas, tend not to be. Maybe
this movie will be the first in a modest new genre--the inquiry into adult
happiness. Unlike Contact , and however doggedly, Shall We Dance?
sincerely wants people to grow up.
"As long as I can
remember, I've been searching. ..." Dr. Arroway (Foster) explains herself to
Joss (McConaughey). (52 seconds):
A government committee
debates the alien blueprints (Foster, Skerritt, and Woods). (58
seconds):
