SOLARIS
Directed by
Steven Soderbergh
By Andrew O'Hehir
There's no way to talk about "Solaris," Steven Soderbergh's visually astonishing and thoroughly admirable new film, without giving away some crucial pieces of its story. So if you're a reader who's determined to avoid spoilers of any kind, I advise you to go elsewhere. (Actually, my view is that the spoiler obsession, born of the Internet's fan-geek culture, is the enemy of real criticism, real discussion and maybe even real thought, but that's a subject for another time.) Furthermore, there's a larger point here: There are some movies, more of them than we customarily acknowledge, whose story hardly matters, and "Solaris" is one of them.
Despite his penchant for wistful romance and his tendency to moralize, Soderbergh's real strength as a filmmaker has always been for color and light, form and composition. (See "Traffic," where supernal cinematic art was deployed to send the message that Drugs Are Bad.) On one hand, it seems remarkable, even outlandish, that the same director who remade the Rat Pack caper flick "Ocean's Eleven" would go on to make a new version of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris," a languorous, Soviet-made art film that (like most of Tarkovsky's work) pushes at the outer edges of philosophical abstraction. But in fact they are adjacent chapters in the same larger work, driven by the same iMac ice blues and brilliant crimsons toward an art that's almost purely pictorial. (I will confess here that I took a pass on Soderbergh's last film, "Full Frontal," as did many other people.)
Beneath the surface chatter and the nervous convolutions of plot -- and I don't think Soderbergh cares half as much about plot as he thinks he does -- "Ocean's Eleven" and "Solaris" may in some sense be the same movie. Both are meditations on lost love, in which George Clooney (who is Soderbergh's muse, mirror and canvas, just as much as Marlene Dietrich was Josef von Sternberg's) recovers a dark-eyed beauty from his past. When the characters at the end of "Ocean's Eleven" gaze, with some inscrutable surmise, into that fountain on the Las Vegas Strip, they might as well be staring into the similarly-hued waters of the ocean planet Solaris, where Clooney meets his destiny in the new movie.
Soderbergh spent a reported $47 million of Fox's money on "Solaris." Frankly I applaud him for every nickel -- these days, Hollywood filmmakers routinely spend twice that sum to manufacture crap -- but it's not at all clear how much of that money will be coming back. The studio has primarily promoted the film as a love story starring Clooney and a beautiful woman, which has the virtue of A) being true and B) sounding like something lots of people might want to see. What the publicity doesn't make entirely clear is that most of the movie is set on a mostly deserted space station orbiting a planet that has some kind of psychological and/or spiritual powers (never specified or defined) and that the beautiful woman in question may be an alien creature or a fantasy projection but is in either case the not-quite-convincing simulacrum of a dead person.
In a recent Entertainment
Weekly interview, Clooney and Soderbergh sounded almost gleeful about the fact
that test audiences came away from "Solaris" thoroughly bewildered.
A friend who probably knows movies better than I do (but hasn't seen the Tarkovsky
"Solaris" or read the original Stanislaw Lem novel on which both films
are based) didn't understand a basic plot point after seeing it.
What's interesting about that -- beyond the schadenfreude of imagining the suits
in Burbank sweatily awaiting the film's opening -- is that Soderbergh (who wrote
his own screenplay) has gone to some lengths to make the Lem-Tarkovsky material
less elliptical and more accessible. He has tried to make psychologist-astronaut
Chris Kelvin (Clooney), who takes the lonely voyage to Solaris, a recognizable
human character with a specific emotional trauma in his past that shapes his
future. Soderbergh's "Solaris" is at least an hour shorter than Tarkovsky's
supremely meditative exercise (which, I should make clear, is one of my favorite
films) and far more crowded with incident.
Oddly, though, none of that seems to matter. Even in the hands of a professed atheist and humanist like Soderbergh, "Solaris" can never be realism. It remains an oblique, allegorical fable that tangles with various big-ticket topics: mortality, grief, loss, the prodigious creative powers of the mind, the mysterious ways of God, the fact that we are both infinitely far away from the dead and oh so close to them. Perhaps even more than Tarkovsky's film, Soderbergh's feels like a purely formal exercise, a visual and philosophical voyage (in the obvious vein of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey") that begins and ends at the same point, our own planet, which turns out to be no more "real," no less rich and strange, than Solaris itself.
We meet Kelvin on Earth, at some unspecified point in the space-travel future, as he mumbles and buzzes his way through his working life as a psychologist or sits stolidly in a support group for survivors of something or other. Clooney looks as handsome as ever, but here it's a grave, almost architectural handsomeness -- he's never given a performance so free of his trademark rakish charm (and may never do so again). An old friend named Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) puts in a video call from deep space: Something weird is happening aboard a recently privatized space station called Prometheus and he needs Kelvin to come immediately. In the muted, earth-toned, rainy Seattle of these early scenes, Kelvin barely seems like a man tethered to his life at all, so off he goes.
There's not much in the way of high-tech conveyances in this film; fans of outer-space gizmology may feel let down. Kelvin is transported to Prometheus in the twinkling of an eye, which ought to be a big fat clue that we're nowhere near the conventional realm of sci-fi movies. (There is some violence in "Solaris," but most of it is emotional in nature; this movie's action quotient approaches absolute zero.) Soderbergh's effects budget seems to have been expended on the nearly motionless tableaus of outer space, which has never been rendered with such intensity, on the blue, glowing, God's-eye orb of Solaris and on the over-bright, corporate-clean and more than faintly creepy interior of Prometheus.
Gibarian is dead, and the floors and ceilings of Prometheus are marked here and there with blood. The station's resident shrink, Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis, so good as the family maid in "Far From Heaven"), won't come out of her room, although she recites for Kelvin's benefit a long list of the clinical disorders she has diagnosed in herself. The only other survivor is Snow (Jeremy Davies), a stringy-haired geek who seems pretty disconnected from reality himself and can only mutter, "I could tell you what's happening here, but I don't know if that would really tell you what's happening here."
There are other people on
board Prometheus too, and they weren't part of the original crew. Everyone on
the station receives "visitors," people from Earth or from their past,
dead or alive. At least they look and act like people from the past, although
their memories are patchy, they don't know where they are or how they got there
and they apparently can't be killed. By this time it's clear that Kelvin is
still haunted by the death of his wife, a lovely, sharp-featured brunette named
Rheya (Natascha McElhone), and when she first appears to him on Prometheus he
is understandably shocked and terrified. Of course this isn't his wife, out
here on the edge of some boiling, protean planet that seems to be alive; he
wants nothing to do with this invader.
"What was that?" Kelvin asks Snow. "Yee-aah," says the latter,
chewing on his split ends. "What about that? I'm still working on that."
But outer space is a lonely place, and what does it mean to say that the pseudo-Rheya (who of course reappears after Kelvin banishes her) isn't real? How real are any of us? She knows who she is; she loves him; they're together again. Isn't that what matters? At about this point in the Tarkovsky film, the astronaut-hero and the rest of the space-station crew slip into a sort of lotus-eater daze of gratified longing. They don't know why Solaris is supplying them with visitors, and they suspect and even expect that the whole thing won't end well. But what does? They have been given the miracle of a second chance, and life is too short and space too immense to interrogate miracles.
Soderbergh attempts to establish this contemplative mode rapidly by staging a confrontation between Kelvin and Dr. Gordon, who has become determined to shed the visitors and return to Earth, and by resurrecting Gibarian to warn Kelvin against logic: "If you keep thinking there's a solution, you'll die here." We begin to see fragments of Kelvin and Rheya's courtship and life together on Earth, and eventually the circumstances of her death, presumably as a way of making Kelvin's grief and guilt specific and individual.
As always with Soderbergh, this comes from an honorable dramatic impulse, but it's not handled all that gracefully. Clooney and McElhone (a slightly awkward beauty and a refreshingly grownup actress) make a winsome pair in these flashback scenes -- yes, Clooneyphiles, you do get a brief, tasteful glimpse of his firm derrière during a bedroom interlude -- but the chronological back-and-forth is distracting and overdone. Why do we want to see a couple dorkily flirting in a bookstore when, in a parallel story line, a guy is trapped in deep space with his dead wife, who is starting to figure out who she used to be and who she is now?
Soderbergh's film is probably not the equal of either Tarkovsky's 1972 predecessor or the memorably Byzantine prose of Lem's novel, but in the end, almost despite himself, this able craftsman has made a brave and lovely companion piece to both of them. His ending is pure cinema at its most marvelous and moving; it brings Kelvin full circle and renders irrelevant all questions about where he is, whether he's alive or dead, whether he's with Rheya or alone. He's in a movie, after all, and if that's not immortality it's about the closest thing we've got.
Steven Soderbergh's Solaris isn't so much a remake of Tarkovsky's film as an adaptation of the original novel as love story. But is it really more an enigmatic experiment..?
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris begins with a delicately enigmatic image of fronds wafting in a stream; in the new Steven Soderbergh version the opening shot is of drops of water on a window pane. It's an image at once eerily noncommittal and matter-of-fact, telling us next to nothing about the film we're about to see, where Tarkovsky's tells us everything. In fact, you could say that the whole of Tarkovsky's poetic disquisition on mind, memory, nature and time's ebb and flow is in that first image, which returns at the close of the film, just before one of the most sublimely mysterious FX shots in film history.
Soderbergh's Solaris has no business with the elegiac nature imagery of Tarkovsky's film, nor does it have the same morose languor - where the Russian movie stretched to 165 minutes and didn't get off Earth for the first 40, Soderbergh contracts his cosmos into a spare, telegraphic hour and a half. His is not, it should be said, in any way a remake of the Tarkovsky film, but rather represents that quintessentially Hollywood trope whereby quibbles about the ins and outs of the 'remake' are wriggled out of a retouraux sources, afresh adaptation of the original Stanislaw Lem novel.
This Solaris is also, much more straightforwardly than Tarkovsky's vaulting enquiry into the state of the future soul, a love story. No more Dostoevskian colloquies here between art and science, incarnated by intense balding savants, but an intimate two-hander between a man and a woman, or rather a dead woman, or rather a dead woman's unearthly simulacrum. The man, psychologist Chris Kelvin, is played by George Clooney, whose brooding detachment for the first time acquires a real intellectual focus as he visits the space station where the influence of the planet Solaris has materialised astronauts' long-absent memories in the form of phantom 'visitors'. In Kelvin's case the planet has revived his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone), whom he has mourned since her suicide.
McElhone, with her strangely elongated features and haunted, almost mesmerised eyes, doesnt quite have the Slavic other-worldliness of Tarkovsky's revenant heroine Hari, played by Natal'ya Bondarchuk, but she's certainly alien, in a breathily cut-glass Home Counties way that stands out as passably strange in a Hollywood context. At first, seen on Earth as the still-living, "difficult" Rheya, she seems merely arch, but in space, as she emerges out of nowhere, she comes into her own. "How are you here?" Kelvin asks. "How do you mean?" she replies, unaware anything's wrong. Her unfazed disorientation, her out-of-spaceness, plays up the film's Pirandello aspect - she's a character who's appeared in the story, unaware that she's even in a story.
The thought of a Hollywood Solaris, let alone one produced by James Cameron, might have struck dread into purist souls, but what's impressive is how committed Soderbergh is to understatement. There's a strange, telling elision, as when at one point the camera drifts past an unexplained rip in the metal wall of Kelvin's cabin. What we haven't seen - whether it was cut, or never even filmed - is Soderbergh's take on the single most dramatic image in Tarkovsky's version, the moment when a bloodied Hari bursts through a steel door. it's one of many remarkable absences that shape a film structured on discontinuities. As in the original, Soderbergh omits the space journey: Solaris might as well be next door to Earth, so suddenly does Kelvin arrive. Clooney himself is a notable absence: in the scenes where Kelvin interrogates his shipmates, Soderbergh keeps his camera away from him, as if they were simply talking into space.
Doing his own editing, Soderbergh makes this a very fragmented narrative, pausing in mid scene with fades in and out of black and providing a starkly notated vision of life on Earth at the start and end of the film. The mood approaches that of Godard or Chris Marker's futures - a whole world evoked in a few concise visual strokes, such as a bowler hat of odd design (perhaps it's another Kubrick reference, to A Clockwork Orange, supplementing the more obvious 2001 allusion in the console lights reflected in Clooney's helmet). Most of all, however, the mood is European, and not just because of the central couple's tryst in an antiquarian bookshop. The sense of temporal dislocation in tandem with romantic mourning echoes Alain Resnais' recently rediscovered Je t'aime je ta'ime (1968) while the scenes in Kelvins claustrophobically clean, sonically deadened apartment - where every shot screams Rheya's conspicuous absence have something of the soul-crushing sleekness of life in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966). The sense of Soderbergh reviving a 1960s dream of futurism is underlined by something else we haven't seen in a sci-fi story at least since Space 1999 (1975): jackets with Nehru collars, in which Clooney looks far less ridiculous than you'd think.
The above-mentioned auteur names locate Soderbergh's film at one remove from the Hollywood sci-fi mainstream: he's pastiching 1960s art cinema's own pastiche appropriation of the genre. This might make his film appear empty and soulless to some - another, even more extreme case of Soderbergh the cold-hearted genre-snatcher borrowing a form, emptying it out and moving on. But this is to reckon without the precise, hand-crafted nature of Solaris: as his own cinematographer (under the name Peter Andrews) Soderbergh determines the total look and feel of the film, creating something that seems organic and fully formed even though its ultimate purpose may escape us. (To use a sci-fi analogy, Solaris resembles one of the Joseph Cornell knock-offs assembled in space by a rogue computer, in William Gibsons Count Zero.)
The point of the film may have been purely to see if it could be done, and if so, what would emerge - Soderbergh may simply be an experimenter in the purest sense. I cant see much connection here with any other Soderbergh film so much as with Ocean's Eleven (2001), partly because there's the aforementioned sense of a honed, autonomous machine running through its elegant but inscrutable operations, partly because that film's single most striking feature - a certain shade of blue, a little deeper and darker than the Yves Klein standard - makes a welcome reappearance here.
There is spectacle here, some of it verging on kitsch - the shifting purple patterns of the planet Solaris itself, like a deluxe version of an energy globe from Camden Market - but otherwise there's an admirably prosaic approach to standard spaceopera paraphernalia. If there must be spacesuits, then let there be spacesuits, and let them resemble the spacesuits of the past; let there be corridors, and let them be a little closer to the familiar industrial spaces of Alien (1979) than to Tarkovsky's lugubriously vacant halls. Soderbergh's real fascination is with textures and elegant details, as if to show that the accoutrements of lifestyle follow humanity even unto the depths of the galaxy: you may find yourself remembering the film for a certain metallic sheen on Clooney's pillow, or for the strange icetray edging around his bed.
Most of all, you may remember the silence. There's no music at all until Kelvin makes it into space, at which point Cliff Martinez's clipped percussion and shimmering electronica shape the mood of the film as decisively as Tarkovsky's own sound design, in which Russian voices, at once distracted and declamatory, hung in the empty, recycled air of enclosed space. Here the voices are muted like felt or suspended in relief against a gossamer steel-mesh sound. You may be thoroughly moved by Solaris, or find it elegantly pointless, yet either way there's a sense of a controlled, melancholic intellect bringing all the pieces together and letting them float: the planet Solaris, you might say, is played by Soderbergh himself.
(Sight & Sound, February 2003)
Cast
George Clooney .... Chris Kelvin
Natascha McElhone .... Rheya
Ulrich Tukur .... Gibarian
Viola Davis (I) .... Gordon
Shane Skelton .... Gibarian's Son
Jeremy Davies .... Snow
Donna Kimball .... Mrs. Gibarian
John Cho .... DBA Emissary #1
Morgan Rusler ....
DBA Emissary #2
Credits
Writing credits (WGA)
Stanislaw Lem (novel)
Steven Soderbergh (screenplay)
Production Design by Philip Messina
Produced
by
Charles V. Bender .... co-producer
James Cameron .... producer
Art Direction
by
Steve Arnold (II)
Keith P. Cunningham
Original Music by Cliff Martinez
Costume Design byMilena Canonero
Cinematography by Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews)
Film Editing bySteven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard)
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Keswick Film Club 2003
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