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.

"A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety" by Jimmy Carter (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                        Published by Simon and Schuster, 2015

                                               

A month or so ago a public announcement was made in newspapers and other periodicals as well as on the major TV stations that our thirty-ninth President, Jimmy Carter, had been stricken with Stage IV Melanoma and that the disease had reached his brain.  Because of the deadly cancer’s degree of advancement to that part of the body, the chances of his survival for more than weeks and months are very dim.  Many including myself heard this news with great sadness.  I have been an admirer of this man for as long as I remember ever hearing of him – before he launched his campaign for election to the White House in the early 1970s.  No ex-President has been more active in the healing of humanity over the thirty-five years since leaving office than this peanut farmer and ex-Naval officer from Plains, Georgia.  He has never been noted for bombast or ostentatious rhetoric but has poured his energy into fruit-bearing labors, scarcely pausing to take a breath between projects.  That all his drive and all his insightful reflections upon crucial social and political topics must soon be deactivated, like a water tap to be shut off forever, is cause for much grief.   

                                               

Re-enforcing my respect for him is his choice of going on the air and making the announcement about his failing health himself, and doing so with a smile and a no-nonsense manner that could not have been more humble and friendly, and certainly not more positive in terms of a faith he has never attempted in the slightest to conceal or minimize.  He took us all right into the crisis – gently and reassuringly, like a member of the family.  Even some of our most conservative pundits have indicated how moved they were by these words from this moderate-to-liberal man of influence.  

                                               

The timing of this health crisis, however, and his publication of “A Full Life”, almost certainly to be the last of his plethora of writings, could not have been more timely.  He was about to begin a tour to sell it when he was presented with the medical findings and decided to postpone the tour in order to continue the focused radiation treatment his doctors at Emory University have prescribed.  Now, because of what looks to the public like an announced death sentence, the book will doubtless not need any special promotion.  I have just completed my reading of it and feel much served by its content. 

                                               

The account of his work on so many fronts over the space of a half century and more, beginning with his childhood on his father’s farm, is thorough and fascinating to read and follow.  That farm was rather huge; the family did more than grow crops, milk cows and slop hogs.  They had a shop, a business, in which Carter learned many skills, especially working with wood.  By the time he was grown he could make or repair just about anything wooden.  But if that were not enough, he was also an accomplished student in school and excelled in the sciences, an aptitude that served him tremendously after he graduated from the Annapolis Naval Academy. 

                                               

In the Navy he rose to a very high rank and became proficient in the knowledge and use of atomic science and engineering.  He was actually on the cutting edge of the peaceful use and development of nuclear fission.  He even commanded an atomic submarine, one of the first of them, and got to visit many countries during his sea duty travels.  He speaks of two near death experiences during those years on the ship, a collision with another vessel and a capsizing, both barely averted.  If the worst had happened, the western world would have lost out on a very productive and inspiring life.

                                               

One section of the book that I found especially significant has to do with the factor of race during his growing up years.  Though he lived in the Deep South and in a community where racial mores of white supremacy were taken for granted and largely unquestioned, Carter had a mother who was a practical nurse and who spent most of her nursing energies caring for the African Americans in the region.  He even had black playmates and remained on good terms with them until he was mature enough to begin fathoming the invisible barriers that separated him from them.  He was spared exposure to the vilest form of bigotry – enough that his consciousness did not require all that much raising on the subject of racial tolerance and equality when he reached adulthood.  He has always felt indebted to his mother for this role modeling; unlike his father she did not deny a black friend the opportunity to visit in the home.     

                                               

Four years as Governor of Georgia were invaluable in preparing him for the Presidency.  Those who comb their way through this autobiography will note how life in the Governor’s chair allowed him to cut his teeth on many of the issues he later confronted in his leadership of the nation.  But what landed on his plate as the head of the country carried him far beyond them.  I will name but a few: the deregulation of all industries to permit better competition in the manufacturing sector; making treaties with Panama; fighting members of Congress for the preservation of Alaskan territory set aside as memorials or as Native American or Eskimo possessions, with oil drilling confined to offshore; brokering peace in the Middle East; influencing foreign leaders, particularly Brezhnev, in the reduction of nuclear weapons; pressing for human rights in Latin America; contending with labor union leaders; taking a stand for renewable energy sources; and coping with the famous Iran Hostage Crisis (for which he was assigned a most undeserved blame). 

                                               

There is to this day great disparity of opinion as to why he lost the 1980 election and failed to be granted a second term.  But in a nutshell, he had, in spite of his polite, unassuming manner of speech and interaction, made too many enemies among certain elements in the government.  You can read Carter’s own account and decide for yourselves.

                                               

His post White House years have found him every bit as active and hard at work as his previous time in politics, perhaps more so.  He set up The Carter Center in Atlanta, an agency still going strong today that has given him leverage to address and become involved in numerous social and humanistic concerns.  Again, I name only a few: improving farming methods in Africa; intervening as a conflict resolver between nations and tribes across the globe; once again brokering peace; monitoring elections in areas where democracy is just beginning to find rootage; extensive work overseeing projects for Habitat for Humanity, which he calls “difficult, unpredictable, exciting, and gratifying”; writing and publishing a total of almost thirty books; birthing Special Education schools in China; interceding between nations to keep the peace; and all this long while teaching on the faculty of Emory University and teaching a Sunday School class in his home church.  He has kept close ties with all former living Presidents.  And he has not hesitated to keep thumping for what he believes to be crucial to the peace and good health of the planet, not the least being America’s declining influence across the globe.  He has also spoken sharply about the scourge of rape on college campuses, and that very recently.

                                               

Carter is one of those individuals for whom there is no such thing as retirement.  He continues to spend himself selflessly and enthusiastically for the country and the world he loves.          

                                               

But as highly as I regard this man, I am compelled to recognize his limitations as a writer.  This is the only one of his twenty-nine books that I have read, but if his mode of composition is the same in all or most of the others, I must conclude that he is first and foremost a writer of content.  He does not write with any real style.  His book is an autobiographical composite of facts and details.  He wants to complete the record, to get it all down.  He is not one to do much self-reflecting; he is skimpy in talking about his inner life.  He comes across more as a scholarly commentator.   

                                               

There are two good examples from the text that bear me out.  One moment he is filling us in on, and taking us through, his remarkable life as a submarine pilot and nuclear scientist, but suddenly he gets word that his father has died and soon afterward he resigns from the Navy and goes back to Georgia, taking on considerable financial struggle and starting life over as a farmer.  People he knew intimately in the service were shocked and felt cheated, and his wife Rosalynn, having enjoyed life as a Navy wife, took his announcement quite hard.  But nowhere does he even begin to tell us what his motivation was for doing this drastic thing.  Did he feel he owed it to his father?  He just reports on the event.  No explanation!

                                               

The other example is his measly mention of winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.  I was looking forward to being taken through that chapter – getting the word of his selection, traveling to Europe to receive it, the occasion of its presentation, and most of all what it meant to him and his wife.  How did he feel about it?  Did he undergo any conflict in the acceptance of it?  But all he does is make passing reference to it, once again as if it is just a particle of happen-so information.  Was he afraid he would come across as bragging?  Why so much purposeless modesty, if that is what it was?  His silence makes us wonder if he valued it at all.   It is just possible that he does talk about it in one of these other books, but as part of the complete story of his full life, it should have been included in this writing.  In my view a very serious omission!

Carter had a great love for all of the arts.  No chief executive ever sparkled with more overt pleasure as he did when he sat in on a concert or a musical rendition at the White House; during his administration; at his invitation scads of performers came to entertain, those of every mode and variety and tradition, and he was quite exuberant with pleasure and excitement occupying the Presidential seat at the Kennedy Center Honors.  This country boy even loves classical music; he is especially fond of Wagner.  Since his departure from public office he has also taken up painting, which he does not speak about at any length, but I hope he finds enrichment for his soul as well as a good time exploring himself as an artist.

                                               

Those of you who have read all I have said in this review can now decide if it is the kind of thing you wish to read for yourselves.  Those who crave the knowledge of history, even the tiny footnotes, should find great satisfaction in poring over it.  It filled in a lot of spaces in my own knowledge.  And those who value as I do the place of faith and faith practice as a motivation for imaginative, open-minded and open-hearted leadership will benefit spiritually by reading an earnest account of a life fully lived without a doubt.  He may not be with us for long in the flesh, but he will. . .be with us.  God bless you, Jimmy, in this life and the next, as you so richly bless us!

                                               

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.