an ideas movie without the ideas, partly salvaged by its star

Rating: 5/10 (10 June 2001)

Jodie Foster can almost persuade you that this great flat slab of a film has some real weight. She's a master of the art not of rising above her material but appearing to raise the material itself, and she's terrific here, giving a concentrated and beautifully controlled performance as someone who has built toughness around herself like a metal sphere, who's pathologically driven, emotionally not so much fragile as seemingly broken beyond repair. Contact works best on its psychological level, as a portrait of the scientist as a young orphan, and it's worth seeing for Foster's performance, as well as for a couple of bravura effects sequences.
Overall, though, it does not work either as philosophy or as drama, something that becomes painfully obvious when almost anyone but Foster is on screen. Contact wants to persuade you that it's a counterblast to the pulping and Hollywooding of science fiction, that it's a film of ideas. It's just that when you look closely, there are no ideas, no insights, just a set of stagy confrontations between crude and unconvincingly-depicted representations of certain types - the will to power, the will to faith, the will to knowledge. They argue at each other for a bit (quite a bit, actually), there's a fantastic voyage, quite beautifully rendered, to a destination which comes straight out of TV movie land, and then we're back to the arguing at each other again. This is a film that believes it can attain profundity by having its characters make statements a lot; it's addicted to the obvious, unimaginatively directed, slackly edited and with damaging plot holes, and has nothing whatever to say to anyone about anything that you couldn't get from the back of a cereal packet.
With a couple of honourable exceptions the supporting cast do the opposite of supporting, mostly because their roles are so banal that there really wasn't anything to be done with them. McConnaughey is unspeakably dreadful as the token lurve interest, while, more surprisingly, John Hurt is just embarrassing in a small but dramatically pivotal role. The honourable mentions go to Jena Malone as Jodie in flashbacks - an excellent match for the star - and William Fichtner as the likeable Kent (one of the film's few concessions to subtlety is its not labouring the character's blindness, where lots of nudges about Vision would have been more characteristic), while Tom Skerritt as the opportunist Drumlin - not a good role - has a couple of good moments. But this is Foster's show, and if you watch it to see her, plus a few belated minutes of visual grandeur that really do convey the sense of wonder for which the dialogue thrashes about so feebly, you'll find things to admire here, if not much to enjoy or excite.