Well Done

Rating: 9/10 (6 May 2013)

Jodi Foster makes this movie, with strong assists from Matthew McConaughey and Tom Skerritt. McConaughey does a good job with a difficult and contradictory character by trying to juxtapose the character's desire to believe in a generalist (philosophical definition) God with the humanist ethic of valuing the individual. Doesn't always work.
Skerritt's character is more one-dimensional and so, so familiar for anyone who's every encountered one of these types in academia, the military or business hierarchies. Hard to see them as human and Skerritt does a bang-up job of portraying the type.
But it's Foster's performance as Arroway that lights-up the screen. Jena Malone (young Ellie) needs to be mentioned here for her own stellar performance in setting the stage for Foster and making the transition believable. But once Foster appears, that's the ballgame. Even when plot elements break down (great script but it does breakdown when the contradictions overwhelm it), Foster's performance carries through. You could care less about the plot.
And there are a lot of plot breakdowns, particularly in terms of the logistics of the Contact. First one: Vega never received coherent radio or TV transmissions from Earth - they would have dissipated before leaving the Solar System, let alone covering 25 light years. Secondly, the first thing any culture would do is establish its identity, the "Me Tarzan" thing. Then there's the Machine - schematics sent without any description of what, precisely, it does. Sell me a bridge.
And then there's a whole host of other problems - if the Vegans had the technology to build such a machine, why not use it instead of beaming signals limited to the speed of light? Surely they would have the technology to identify Earth and do a spectrographic analysis of our atmosphere to see if it was compatible with theirs. And, assuming they could parse images out of those primitive TV signals, why not watch a while and then send a slightly more personal and focused message? But that's not what the movie's about and the suspension of disbelief covers most of those issues.
The movie is really about the Wonder of the Universe and the point of the Contact is to emphasis that wonder, not watching alien home movies. So, as illogical as it is, it makes a lot more dramatic sense to portray the Contact as a great mystery sent to us for unraveling.
This is where Malone and Foster's performances shine, projecting that sense of wonder with energy and passion from the first scene to the last, gluing your eyes to the screen.
Personally, the only part I didn't buy was her brief sojourn at where-ever-it-was beachy kind of place where she met her father again and what the hell is this all about? I get it in dramatic and thematic terms but, for me, it grates like a bad dream sequence. Even at that, the movie recovers magnificently by focusing on the What Happened? issue after the capsule just kind of goes splat! when the Machine is turn on. Empirically, nothing - it just drops despite Arroway's passionate insistence she went Somewhere.
While the Somewhere doesn't work for me as a Somewhere, it works better than a prosaic Welcome to Vegan, Earthling! sign would have so you take what you get. And I found the What Happened controversy surprising engaging as it led to the final scene, Foster sitting on the edge of a New Mexican cliff and seeing the Universe in a handful of soil. Blake, anyone?
That is what Contact is all about, Emerson and Blake: seeing the Universe in a grain of sand and the Transcendent perception of its workings. Foster's performance is an elegant expression of that quest.