Where Angels Don't Fear to Tread.

Rating: 7/10 (19 April 2007)

The film, which isn't a bad one, is so packed with ideas that I'm going to skip the probably familiar plot and just make a few comments. Otherwise we're going to run out of space.
What kind of names are we dealing with here? Is it Carl Sagan's idea of goyim naches that WASP parents go about giving their little baby boys and girls names like "Palmer Joss"? And "Ellie ARROWAY"? I have it on good authority -- just having made it up -- that in the entire four-million-year history of the human race, nobody has EVER been named Palmer Joss or Ellie Arroway!
The film is about a government project that is shut down to cut funds for non-utilitarian research. When it's privately funded, Foster takes over. When they get results, the government bureaucracy arrogantly moves in again, with James Woods muttering darkly about "militarization" of the program. Now "military" is a dirty word in this context. We've already seen bulky generals sporting lots of stars. We've seen armed men diffuse throughout the SETI station when the news of the signal gets out. Playing the militarization card is a cheap shot at a stereotyped and convenient target. (Yet it's impossible to imagine its not happening.)
One-dimensional characters. Foster = lonely, breathlessly idealistic scientist. McCaughnehy = New Age soul looking for theological "meanings" behind events. John Hurt = sinister-looking Howard-Hughes billionaire operating underground. (My supporting player in the cult hit, "From the Hip.") James Woods = obstacle in Foster's life space designed only to object to everything she wants to do, for political reasons. Tom Skerrit = manipulative, ambitious, egocentric bureaucrat whose name ("Drumlin") means a small hill. President Clinton, Forrest-Gumped into the movie, is bland and speaks in generalities so nebulous that not even Vegans could guess what the hell he's getting at. But this is the way a politician speaks, and he's believable. I even believed Clinton when he said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Of course his definition of "sexual relations" may be a little ideosyncratic, like mine. Mine involves handcuffs and fettucine.
Jodie Foster, as Ellie Arroway, whom most people address as "Doctor" but whom a simian politician (Rob Lowe) calls "Miss." The selection committee asks her, as one of the candidates for interplanetary travel, "Do you believe in God?", and she comes up with some bumbling response about trusting data. Why did she bother to tell the truth? It never stopped our astronauts, who lied blithely about believing in God and going to church regularly. Anyway she could have copped out with some baloney about, yes, she believed in a kind of God like Spinoza's, who expressed himself or herself in physical laws. By the way, the interrogator who says that 95 percent of the world's people believe in a Supreme Being is full of malarkey. Using E. B. Tylor's "minimal definition of religion," a belief in supernatural spirits, we can say that all cultures have a religion, but not all of them have what we would recognize as a Supreme Being. Does Buddhism have a Supreme Being? What's He like? Is Zero a God? The movie raises the question of what would happen if two cultures with very different values came into contact with one another. It's an interesting question. As Arnold Toynbee has observed, it's happened before, when European adventurers first began landing on the soil of the New World. Those settlers devoutly believed in both God and Gold, to the extent that they could distinguish between them. We can at least hope for better results when we go to Vega.
Jodie Foster is the central figure of course. Her features are sharp and sleek like a shark's so they are almost a little scary, but her talent is such that she's able to project a full range of emotions, both blatant and subtle, and the viewer is able to make contact with her.
One final thought. After watching the expectable computer-generated climactic special effects, the thought came to me unbidden that no power on earth could get me to set foot on that contraption.
I miss Carl Sagan a lot. He was a genuinely nice guy who had the grace and good sense not to drop into my comprehensive exams when they were in fact open to any member of the faculty. His enthusiasm for the objects of his study were catching, in the way the flu is catching. Billions and billions of moons and galaxies. I hope he's now at home somewhere among them.