Contact (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                             2 hrs & 29 min, color, 1997

                                               

What if word got out all over the globe that proof of intelligent life off the earth had been found, and found in the form of a mathematical communication from a faraway planet or star system to radio astronomers on earth?  I am sure we all have speculated about this sort of thing, even at any early age.  A cousin of mine and I as children would from time to time go outside at night and “study astronomy”.  Actually what we did was sit, look into the star spangled sky, speculate about the possibilities of life elsewhere, make up stories about travel into space and try to imagine what space travel would really be like.  We looked and dreamed and wondered how life elsewhere would get in touch with the planet Earth or we with them.  But what would really be the upshot of such a breakthrough?  What impact would the news have upon human society at large?

                                               

Stanley Kubrick in his “Space Odyssey” epic, basing his work on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, advanced the supposition that the powers that be would withhold the discovery from the public, fearing that the news would cause “shock and social disorientation”.  Those are exact words from the script, the rationalization for keeping it under wraps.  Hence, the veil of secrecy that prevents even the astronauts, on their way to find the source of the communication, from knowing the purpose of their mission.  Could such a development in fact be hidden from the civilian population?  Carl Sagan thought otherwise when he created his best selling, award-winning novel “Contact”  published in 1985, adapted into this fascinating science fiction film in 1997.  (Sadly he never quite lived long enough to see it, dying one year before its release.)  

                                               

The interception of the radioed transmission apparently beamed from a star causes tremendous international excitement and pleasure on the part of some and fear and condemnation on the part of others.  A huge carnival atmosphere is generated, one that embraces all levels of officialdom and all nations and societies.  The central character in the story is a young American woman named Ellie Arroway, played with inexhaustible energy and style and near perfection by the incomparable Jodie Foster.  At the beginning Ellie is a nine year old child curious about the stars and planets and the power of radio transmission, so much so that she is already a ham radio operator, her equipment provided by her widower father, who encourages her hobby.  Before long her father dies quite suddenly.   But under his inspiration she plows on undeterred and fully dedicated to the subject of science, excelling scholastically right on through public school, graduating with top grades from Harvard and obtaining a doctorate in her field of outer space radio exploration.  She is also quite a scrapper, pushing hard everywhere she can to raise money for her local station and proving herself to be confrontational enough to make as many enemies as friends. 

                                               

Then in the middle of a New Mexico desert late one summer night, while examining the night sky above her, comes that powerful radio squawk that wakes up her and the studio assistants not far away.  She begins barking out orders to them over remote control, which they follow with excitement almost as strong as hers, and within a matter of hours they have traced the origin of the signal, a prominent constellation that she has for years studied, about twenty-six light years away from Earth.  Before long NASA and the intelligence sectors and the Executive branch of government descend upon her desert domain, and all the big brains of science are hard at work deciphering the complicated mathematical formula that the alien communicators have laid out.  It turns out that it is a design for a space vehicle to be constructed on Earth for travel to that apparently friendly civilization that is extending the intergalactic invitation.

                                               

All Jodie Foster fans will surely want to see this, if they have not already.  (The film is now eighteen years old.)  The cast is quite huge, but its size in no way dwarfs her; she maintains her solo star power all the way through.  The script – by James V. Hart and Michael Golden, under the direction of Robert Zemeckis – sounds out abundant material close to the heart, the minutiae of the science in no way conflicting with it.   Ellie even has a love interest.  Matthew McConaughey is a Christian philosopher named Palmer Joss who is widely known as an authority on what ails the soul of his country, consulted by Presidents and heads of state.  Joss develops a deep adoration of, as well as a passionate attraction to, Ellie. 

                                               

Anyone at all familiar with Carl Sagan’s work knows that he was fascinated by the seeming struggle between science and religious belief, between the disciplines of scientific inquiry based upon what is strictly verifiable and the tenets of faith that require a leap into the abstract and the unknowable.  This tension is made ever so vivid in the portraiture of Ellie.  She is an obstinate atheist at first, most of the way through the story in fact, until she is exposed to something immense and stupefying when she ventures beyond the boundaries of her disciplines and her expectations.  I prefer not to relate any more details of the narrative, which thrives to a great extent on imagination and surprise. 

                                               

Like Sagan, fictional Ellie devotes her life to the quest for intelligent life elsewhere, and she is brave enough to want to risk that very life in the exploration her discovery demands of her.   Sagan was strangely influenced by his parents.  His mother was a devout, worshipful believer while his father was a practicing skeptic.  Thereby he absorbed a very deep spirituality of his own but learned to be skeptical and cautious about ultimate reality.    He once said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”   Elsewhere he speaks of how “the scale of the universe opened up to me.  It was a kind of religious experience.  There was a kind of magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me.”  No one could accuse him of having missed the forest during his intricate work among the trees.

                                               

The man’s contributions are extensive, both in written form (the author of over twenty books) and in the laboratory.   His Masters dissertation published in 1960 was entitled “Physical Studies of Plants and Satellites”.  For nine years he was associate director of the Center for Radio Physics and Space Research at Cornell University.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg!  Read about him on Google.  Boning up on all this has inspired me to reserve from Netflix the entire TV series “Cosmos”, which he created, presided over and appeared in during the early 1980s.  It remains one of the most successful in TV history; for some reason it passed me by when it aired (or I passed it by), so it is my intent to catch up on all its wealth of commentary in the coming weeks. 

                                               

Three times during the “Contact” footage a priceless observation is made, from the lips of three separate individuals.  The universe, we are reminded, contains billions of galaxies; we and our planet are just a pin prick within one of them.  So if our life on Earth is all the intelligent life there is anywhere, that “seems like an awful waste of space”.  Sagan was half scientist and half dreamer.  He probed the microorganisms, while he was busy pointing us to the heavens.  What a piece of work he was – and is! 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Woman in Gold (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                   1 hr & 49 min, color, 2015

                                     

There is a statute of limitations for the prosecution of many crimes, a point in time beyond which nobody can be brought to trial for their commission, even in the face of glaring evidence.  But there is no such statute pertaining to the achievement of belated poetic justice, even if only in small measure.  An eighty-one-year-old Jewish woman named Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), a Holocaust survivor having escaped to America in the early 1940s and having made her home in Los Angeles for the entire intervening sixty-plus years, was given a chance to prove the truth of that in no uncertain terms.  The screen story concerns her relentless quest to retrieve prized paintings and art objects stolen from her family by the Nazis in Austria and hanging in Austria’s Belvedere Art Gallery.  She felt they should be given to her as the sole surviving family member.

                                     

It is the private papers of her sister Luise bequeathed to Maria upon Luise’s death that incite her to investigate the matter of their ownership and pursue a case.  It is difficult enough to fight “city hall”, but she has to fight a foreign government and the obstinacy of an entrenched national bureaucracy who consider themselves the protectors of national art treasures, however obtained.  Silently lurking at the edge of the dispute is the unmentionable complicity of the Austrian nation in the genocidal perpetrations of the Nazis. 

                                     

In the company of a young Jewish lawyer from LA by the name of Randy Schoenberg, grandson of the famous composer as it so happens, she goes back to Austria, breaking her vow never to set foot in Europe again.  It does not take them long before they discover that they have a mammoth fight on their hands, one that keeps them doggedly pushing for years before achieving success.

                                     

What we have here is not only an exciting true tale of contending plaintiffs and defendants, but also a very emotional story told with great passion and fervor and without sentimentality.  Because of excellent screen writing by Alexi Kaye Campbell and beautiful directing by Simon Curtis, the victimized family, with whom we become acquainted in period sequences from the wartime ordeal, gets under the skin; we are drawn into their heartbreak but also into their quality of character and courage.  I must confess I was far more deeply touched than I expected to be.  The fate of a canvas became far less crucial to me than the dignity of the human beings caught in the Nazi grip.  I was moved to considerable tears before the journey ended, emotionally won over.  

                                     

The movie opens as the portrait called Woman in Gold is being painted shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.  The artist is the famous Gustav Klimt, and he is instructing Adele Bloch-Bauer, a teenage girl who is to become in later years Maria’s aunt, the woman of the picture, on how to sit and pose.  Very little is said between them, but the brief way the scene is photographed and cut gives the viewer the unmistakable feeling that this lady growing up will have a very woeful, unhappy future, that the masterpiece being constructed before her eyes will outlive her and transcend her.  Her face is unsmiling but not unloving, and in a strange kind of way she seems to be melting into the texture of what is being created. 

                                     

Adele died in 1925 from meningitis a decade or so later, and the painting of her was hung in the home of Maria’s father (Adele’s brother) where it remained until 1941, when the Nazis pillaged his entire estate, taking all the artworks with them.   

                                     

Woman in Gold, as the painting came to be called, is a fascinating experience of the eye.  Adele’s face is embroidered lavishly in all shades of the color; it is not surprising that the Nazis were drawn to it for exploitation, nor is it surprising that they obliterated the name of the deceased subject at the foot of the canvas and made the image one of mysterious origin.  They were not about to regale a work of art in which the person being portrayed and embellished was Jewish.  The Nazis also stole a costly, exceedingly beautiful necklace belonging to the family along with the painting.  Herman Goering, one of Hitler’s notorious henchmen, later made the necklace a gift to his wife to display at public events.  It is against this horrific background of persecution that Maria’s recent story takes on body and soul all these many decades later. 

                                     

No doubt we have all witnessed on screen scenes of separation, when the parties involved know that the parting is permanent.  This movie contains one that will be hard for me to forget.  In one of the erstwhile sequences the young Maria is virtually begged by her parents to take flight from the country.  They prevail upon her to escape to America and make a new life there with her husband.  They do so, knowing that they, full of years already and lacking the means or the stamina to escape themselves, will never survive the Nazi occupation of their city and country, whether they are sent to extermination camps or not.  The three are completely openhearted to each other; the embracing is about as impassioned and compelling as a moment on screen could conceivably get.  It tears at the heart, though it ends in a most endearing manner.    

                                     

Of course the real driving element in the movie is Helen Mirren.  She works magic in her portrayal of this feisty woman, nothing out of the ordinary for her.  Ms Mirren has put together an acting career that few female performers now living have ever been able to match.  She not only has racked up a large quantity of work on the stage and in movies and television over the last few decades but has proven herself adept at variety.  She is a British citizen who has given us memorable characters ranging between saint and devil and all shades in between and has filled the shoes of women of various languages and nationalities.  Even here she steps outside her native vernacular to create a convincing profile of an Austrian Jew who has been Americanized over the better part of a lifetime and who has no trouble addressing people in fluent German.  She has won countless honors for various performances and was awarded the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2003 Queen Birthday Honor List.  But she is a citizen of the world, not provincial or stuffy and has a great sense of humor as anyone who Googles her will find out.  Keep it going, Helen!

                                     

I am sometimes amazed at how skillfully the younger version of a character is matched with the older lead – a great fete of casting.  A young actress by the name of Tatiana Maslany, who bears a faint but good enough resemblance to Mirren, plays Maria in 1941 as a young and desperate soul who has to improvise her own escape plan with her musician husband to elude the German dragnet.  She projects fear in extraordinary measure, her face a picture of youthful purity and sweetness traumatized by insufferable agony over what she sees slipping away from her.  She is every mother/father’s idea of a misplaced child whisked away by the storm. 

                                     

An even more impressive co-lead is Ryan Reynolds, who fills the role of Maria’s lawyer friend Randy.  He comes on like a nervous, slightly wet behind the ears youth getting his first taste of professional success with a prestigious law firm but torn and confused by the offer of a high profile case involving art reclamation that could net him a huge payoff.  He is a little fumbling at first, but he slowly warms to the friendly urgency of this Austrian lady and undergoes a sea change when in Vienna he visits the Holocaust Museum and internalizes how the Holocaust has touched his own ancestry.  After that, it is no longer just a job but a cause célèbre.  He eventually becomes a firebrand in court and works wonders for her.     

                                     

The art direction and the color photography were no less than intoxicating to me.  And, as I have already reported, the film has a deep emotional payoff, concerned with the gift of memory and the delicate work of preserving the sacred continuity between the living and the honored dead.  A fine piece of work all around! 

                                     

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.