There is a tiny part
of me that hates Solaris, Steven Soderbergh’s latest, not
for any fault of the film but because I know that in the future,
I will have to endure at least one dirty failed philosophy student
of a stoner cornering me at a party and informing me how deep this
picture is if I “really think about it.” I’m not against thinking
about movies, and Solaris certainly asks to be pondered,
I just don’t like the superior position one takes in the phrase
“if you really think about it.” The problem is, Solaris is
a ‘really think about it’ kind of flick and for that I love it.
In his third picture
with George Clooney, Soderbergh pulls off an actor-director team-up
trilogy that rivals the Russell-Carpenter films of the early Eighties.
When boiled down to its basics, Solaris comes right off the
shelf of classic Star Trek -- while in orbit around a newly
discovered phenomena, crew members are visited by long lost loved
ones, but to quote one of the crew, “I could tell you what’s happening,
but I don’t know if that would really tell you what’s happening.”
Soderbergh isn’t as interested in stories to tell as he is in how
to tell them.
The picture masterfully
stitches one languid scene to the next with daring ellipses that
thrill and challenge. It starts at full speed in a sequence that
proves an opening can leave an audience breathless without the typical
action film two seconds from the climax gimmick.
Clooney plays psychologist
Chris Kelvin, who receives a message asking him to come to the Prometheus,
a space craft in orbit of Solaris. Solaris ripples and glows with
fluid and electricity, at times looking like a Fantastic Voyage
style view of the inner-eye and also invoking a Discovery Channel
animation of synapses firing. Kelvin arrives at the Prometheus to
find only two living crew members, one terrified (Viola Davis) and
one tweaked (Jeremy Davies), and a cold storage full of bodies.
Sure, with this set-up
your average sci-fi picture would identify some evil cause behind
the crew’s loss of their senses and head us down to the planet surface
for a final showdown with whatever entity would dare mess with the
heads of hard working earthlings, but this ain’t your average sci-fi
picture. Solaris is much more 2001 or Silent Running
than it is Star Trek or Alien. This picture is more
about memory and grief than it is about space ships and blasters.
The story bounces back
and forth between the goings on onboard the Prometheus and Kelvin’s
past on a decidedly non-futuristic Earth. No year in the future
is specified, but mankind has obviously mastered that whole faster-than-light-speed
thing, and the TVs are much cooler, but people still open doors
with knobs and hinges by hand, and prepare their own dinners without
the replicators or nutrient pills we’ve been told are on inevitable.
On Earth Kelvin loved and lost Rheya (Natascha McElhone), but on
the Prometheus he wakes up to find her in his bed.
While Solaris
is a remake of a Russian film based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, Soderbergh’s
script and direction make the material his own, as one would expect
from one of the most interesting and talented directors working
today. The picture brings to mind last years Vanilla Sky,
another American remake of a foreign language film by one of the
great directors of today.
Sadly Solaris
is probably doomed to the same fate as that under appreciated film.
It will play multiplexes even though it’s an art house flick because
it happens to have a multiplex budget. This weekend, turkey-drowsy
families will go to see the new George Clooney flick, urged by an
overemphasis on producer James Cameron’s thankfully unnoticeable
involvement, and will be asked to digest more than they bargained
for. I hope I’m wrong and this film is embraced, but I’m sure it
will lose its Oscar nom spot to My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Soderbergh proves that
science fiction doesn’t have to be limited to action pictures set
in the future. That, more interestingly, the progress and possibly
even the evolution of the human race won’t necessarily answer the
questions about where we came from or why we’re here, but that progress
might make those answers seem a little more urgent. That the farther
we go along, the more we need to know will grow exponentially.
Structurally, the film
bears this out, as each answer we are given just makes us ask ten
more questions. The questions range from the simply intriguing,
“Is an imaginary friend any less valid than a real one?” to the
complexly weighty, “Are we created in God’s image or he in ours?
Or neither? Or both?” Solaris poses these questions in such
a form that they are really just variations on a theme.
The entire film plays
around these problems of identity and identifiers, of creators and
created, with such complexity, yet never becomes heavy handed or
obvious. Some of the audience may be turned off by the picture’s
reluctance to dish out answers, but that very reluctance makes Solaris
the treasure that it is.
Solaris succeeds
with an act that usually spells disaster for a film: that of rumination.
The film plays its one theme in so many different ways it isn’t
obvious how well everything ties together. Soderbergh has once again
jumped the tracks of genre just as he did with The Limey
and Ocean’s 11, both following and recreating what we know
about these old friends, just as the characters high above Solaris
do for themselves. It’s really deep. If you really think about it.
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