"Contact": Outer Space & Inner Space

A film in which life from the stars tells us something about life on Earth.

Contact (1997)

We all know the maxim about polite dinner parties – no religion or politics – and Hollywood has always taken half of it to heart. So rarely does cinema deal directly with questions of faith that when a film dares to take religious experience seriously, it feels daring and fresh. Despite being a quarter-century old, Contact (dir. Robert Zemeckis) still feels remarkably fresh, thanks to the way it puts religion and politics back on the table.

In Contact, Dr Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is the stand-in for the kind of highly skeptical scientist for whom test tubes and telescopes are the tools that lead us to what matters most. She is like Richard Dawkins if he weren’t so abrasive; when told the conversion story of Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey, playing a “man of the cloth without the cloth”), she gently asks whether his spiritual experience could be accounted for with wishful thinking, but there is no suggestion that she thinks less of him for his belief. Her ow…