Word: mcconaughey
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...affect a Gandhi-like purity. Putting the best barefoot forward in this trend was TIME's 1996 cover shot of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen displaying his pedicure-needy toes. Other celebrities who have recently unshod for the camera: Harrison Ford and Donald Trump (PEOPLE), Jackie Chan and Matthew McConaughey (GQ) and Yahoo! co-founder David Filo (Newsweek...
...sort of a New Age Billy Graham who has wormed his way into the high councils of state as spiritual consultant to the President. He is played with a nice shiftiness--you really wouldn't want to trust this guy with a church-collection plate--by Matthew McConaughey. Yet director Robert Zemeckis lets him carry the movie's message. That is to say, Joss, not Ellie--bless her sternly rational soul--happens to be right; there is, just as he has so tiresomely predicted, a metaphysical dimension to deep space...
Despite the belligerent objections of James Woods' National Security Advisor, the political phenagling of Ellie's nemesis, the President's opportunistic national science advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), and the gentler opposition of religious scholar Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), spiritual mainstay of the White House and Ellie's romantic interest, she is selected as the transportee. After "wormholing" breathlessly through hyperspace, what she finds at the end of her journey is no little green men but a quasi-meta-physical Carl Saganish lesson (small wonder, since the movie was co-produced by the late Sagan and his widow...
...course, the soulmate the script gives her is an odd choice: apparently intended to serve as the agnostic Ellie's spiritual check and, perhaps, her alter ego; McConaughey manages to be a likable and reassuring figure. But even his best efforts can't hide the fact that his character is both sketchily drawn and almost laughably improbable (imagine him a fixture in Bill Clinton's White House...
...case, McConaughey and the rest of the supporting cast are all subordinated to Foster's principal--an understandable decision, but not necessarily the best one. The shortest shrift is given to Angela Bassett as a crisply level-headed Presidential aide who appears just often enough to make you wish she'd been given a meatier role. Woods as the necessary pain-in-the-ass gets a few laughs, but not enough to prevent a certain deadening feel from setting...