Best holiday movie is a classic message of hope

Last year around this time I wrote about what’s always on my mind around Christmas: the stars. Like many people from mixed-faith families, every year as Christmas approaches, I stare anxiously into the chasm of a divided religious identity. The answers, at least for an incurable Trekkie like myself, seem always to hover just beyond the warm and spherical little terrarium we call Earth, always out of reach.
When asked to write about the best Christmas films, the obvious choices came to mind: “It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story,“ “A Christmas Carol,” the old and still-charming stop animation films such as “Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer” and “A Year Without a Christmas,” the original (not Jim Carrey’s) “How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Tim Burton’s dark fable “Nightmare Before Christmas” and Danny Boyle’s parable of greed and faith “Millions” (2004). Of the common thematic elements of most Christmas movies, the birth of Jesus Christ was not the first to come to mind but rather something more along the lines of Capitalist Redemption. At the heart of all these movies is either a rogue miser, a ominous dearth of presents under the tree or a near miss with financial ruin. While the day of Christmas might be saved, what next? Overflowing garbage cans of clear plastic clamshells, Styrofoam molds, wrapping paper, cardboard and a looming credit card bill. Where does the fidelity really lie – with deus or machina – seems to be the central question for the next millennium, especially in this hostile economic climate.
So, here is where a writer-mom/ad hoc film critic-takes a chance. After much deliberation and some soul searching, my pick for this year’s Christmas movie is not a Christmas movie at all. It is not even a great film by many standards. But the fact that the film is mainstream and palatable to a broader audience may be its saving grace – one that might also grant the film some degree of cinematic amnesty from claims against it of heresy or elitism. The film of which I speak is Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 science-fiction adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact.”
A quick summary of the film: The story follows the film’s protagonist, SETI astronomer Dr. Eleanor Arroway (played by Jodi Foster) in her tireless search for alien intelligence through the technology of radio astronomy. She and her associates pick up a signal they believe to be something distinct from background noise and after much fuss, the signal is decoded three dimensionally and turns out to be blueprints for a “Machine.” No one really knows what the Machine will do but the nations of the world come together to fund it and the debate over who is the right choice as alien ambassador ensues between the white Christian male scientist and the atheist female scientist (Arroway), whose faith in science allowed her to pick up the signals in the first place. The film examines the possible repercussions of alien contact and the foreseeable difficulties a human race divided along the lines of culture, religions, politics and dogmatic hierarchies would encounter in coming to terms with the fact that we are not alone. At the heart of the script is the question of what an older and more advanced alien civilization might expect of humanity and what message they might send. (The film begins when scientists decode a return signal from space containing video footage of Hitler giving a speech.)
Just to reiterate, while “Contact” won several awards for special effects, it is not a masterpiece. First off, the choice to cast Matthew McConaughy as Palmer Joss, a student of Christian theology whose work concerns the negative impact of scientific discourse on faith in the Third World, is so ridiculous it’s almost brilliant unless, of course, you subscribe to the possibility that a Texas zealot always knows best. Second, the film is full of pyrotechnic plot devices, including the unlikely and seamless infiltration of a bomb-laden fanatic into a militarily defended launch site. The film relies heavily on the heroics of an eccentric billionaire and the reduction of time required to build the Machine to a R&D window scarcely sufficient to build the perfect training wheels.
But what works about “Contact” how, like many science fiction films, the vastness of space becomes the infinite geography in which to explore the finite, if one accepts human beings as mortal, spiritual question of God. That the first envoy sent to make contact with an alien race is both an atheist and a woman is suggested as doubly blasphemous in the film to a Western male hegemony. But when Dr. Arroway finally arrives at her destination, the sentient being she encounters takes the form of her father and she realizes immediately that the ability to recognize alien intelligence depends first and foremost on the limitations inherent to formal conception of that entity. And this is why “Contact” is my Christmas pick this year – the sentient being and/or a holy spirit (well, why not?), as Arroway discovers, is neither man nor woman but rather that which she constructs and projects as good in her experienced life – her father.
Of course, because we are talking about Hollywood, no one believes Arroway’s story about her journey in the Machine. All external evidence proves that she was gone for only a few minutes yet the static on her recording devices support her claims of having been gone for 18 hours, traveling at light speed through a Wormhole towards a white sand beach in a distant galaxy where her long-deceased father waits for her with a message for all humanity. Arroway has a touch of Jean de Arc in her. What is lost in the static is solid proof of everything she has seen and experienced and she asks her accusers to take her word on faith, which of course almost everyone refuses to do. (We are talking about the U.S. military here.) Yet we the audience know that if Arroway hadn’t been faithfully listening to static from the beginning, all opportunity would have been lost.
The classic Christmas films – and I have to admit I’ve loved them all – tell stories of redemption and forgiveness, of generosity and plentitude, of charity and love for the fellow man, tapping into commonly felt pressures of excess, fears of the crumbling monolith of capital consumerism that make it difficult to find time for spiritual recalibration around the holidays. If “Contact” is about the quest to restore faith, it is also about listening through the noise for a message of hope, sent with love and a little humility, from the stars.