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An appreciation of Solaris

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 8, 2002 at 09:33:04

Not so much a review (fan or pan), as a good old-fashioned *appreciation*:

WATERWORLD

...The science-fiction fan of today may be out of shape for such ruminative rigors.

Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published December 5, 2002

*Solaris*

Steven Soderbergh needed Solaris in the worst way. Although his Full Frontal earlier this year proved to everyone including Soderbergh that neither the public nor the critics would follow him blindly down any self-indulgent path, that act of Inside Hollywood navel-gazing hardly served as penance for the crass commercialism of Ocean's Eleven. (Or, in lesser degrees of crassness, Traffic and Erin Brockovich.) It could serve only as a monument to his run-amuck ego.
Solaris is different. Certainly it is not without self-indulgence -- a fifty-million-dollar science-fiction film devoid of action and sparse in special effects -- yet the self-indulgence in this instance is balanced, as it was not in Full Frontal, by intelligence, by generosity (beyond the glimpses, for interested parties, of George Clooney's tush), and by a genuine urge to engage and to stimulate.

Part of the enjoyment of it, then, is the anticipation of the feelings of outrage, bewilderment, even outright derision on the part of the multiplex crowd unaccustomed to demands on their patience, their attention, their willingness actually to think about what they are seeing and to talk about it afterwards. And not only the anticipation of it, but (to go by my own experience at the preview screening) the awareness of it in the crowd around you. In the demands on the spectator, as well as in things like the Resnaisian nonsequential editing and the Godardian muting of sound, Soderbergh summons up the art film of yore (similar, in that sense, to his First Career Misstep, Kafka), so that the time frame of the film almost seems less futuristic than historical.

Of course, the Andrei Tarkovsky film of the same name, adapted from a cult novel by Stanislaw Lem, was a bona fide art film of yore -- the Russian answer to 2001, carrying the upmanship spirit of the Space Race onto the movie screen -- and indeed much of the Soderbergh intelligence comes down to knowledgeability in place of originality. He knows enough about movies to select a Tarkovsky film for remake. But then, too, he knows enough about moviemaking to make some improvements. The viewer who is wriggling out of his skin at the Soderbergh version might be astonished to find out how far Soderbergh has streamlined it, shaving a full hour off Tarkovsky's running time. Truthfully, after thirty years, I could not (till I watched it again last weekend on TCM) recall much of the original. More truthfully, I don't think I could have recalled much of it after thirty days. The Soderbergh, without the test of time, seems somehow more vivid, more (believe it or not) concentrated and communicative.

It gets off to a quiet but efficient start. In an undated future, a going-through-the-motions psychotherapist (Clooney, who for the occasion has stilled his head-waggling cockiness) receives a personal appeal from an old friend on a space station in orbit over the water-blanketed planet of Solaris. He -- the therapist -- is the ideal man to deal with an undisclosed problem aboard the ship: "I wish I could be more specific, but, you know, people are listening." A twofold mystery has thus been set up: What's the problem? And why is the therapist the ideal detective to investigate it? He arrives at the station to find blood stains all over the sleek metallic surfaces, and his friend in a body bag. The first of the two survivors he encounters is no help, and not merely because he is played by one of our most annoying young actors, Jeremy Davies, a mumbly murmury Methody parody of a Marlon Brando wannabe, a Scott Marlowe, a Vic Morrow. "Can you tell me what's happening here?" is the obvious question. The answer is: "I could tell you, but that wouldn't really tell you what's happening."

When the therapist lies down to catch up on his sleep, a series of dream-flashbacks recounts his meeting and courtship of his wife (the saucer-eyed Natascha McElhone); and when he awakens from his reverie, his wife is lying beside him. But his wife, as we realize soon enough, is long dead. More mysteries: Who, or what, is this simulacrum, and where did she come from? "I don't know what's happening," she submits at one point, both echoing and challenging the viewer: "What do you think is happening?"

To tell more of the story, maybe even to tell this much, is verboten in the unwritten critical rulebook. I could only, after you have sat through it for yourself, and if you need a little push, start the conversational ball rolling by reminding you that Solaris is a planet of water, and that in the language of dreams, so they say, water represents emotion. (On Earth, the water motif is kept going in the form of a steady rain.) The film, from whatever angle you approach it, offers much to mull over on the subject of human relationships: the mental element, the creative element, of romantic love; the extent to which the beloved is a projection of desire and a construction of fantasy; the extent to which he or she remains independent and unruly; the extent to which an individual is deficient and needs another for completion.

The science-fiction fan of today may be out of shape for such ruminative rigors. (Certain plot points, concerning the materialization of memory, took me back to Journey to the Seventh Planet, not a designated egghead film like 2001 and Solaris, but a grade-Z quickie from the time -- early Sixties -- when SF was not simply a synonym for FX.) And the fans are not the only ones who might be out of shape. It would not be improper, not be ill-bred, to suggest that Soderbergh leaves too much to conjecture at the end; that a few more questions could have been answered, or least asked, without quashing all discussion; and that the ending itself, while it leaves room for ambiguity and irony, invites the kind of mushy, muddy feel-goodism that John Edward and James Van Praagh hold out to the bereaved on daily television.

Give Soderbergh credit, in any event, for guts: for risking his "gains," for reversing his field, for restoring his honor. And not just guts. The film has what every fictional world should have, a climate, an atmosphere, a gravitational pull; its photography (credited to one of Soderbergh's pseudonyms, Peter Andrews) is classically clean and controlled, a refreshing change from the delirium tremens in whose grips he has been since Out of Sight; and the two zones of action -- present and past, outer space and Earth -- are differentiated not by the skin-deep tints of Traffic or the contrasting film stocks of Full Frontal, but by the lighting, the décor, the color scheme inside the settings: cold, silvery, pewtery, gun-metally vs. warm, goldeny, ambery, umbery. If in the final analysis the film still seems overlong and overdeliberate (a director cannot be expected to shed his sense of self-importance all at once), it is nonetheless a respectable effort. The word has been selected with care. Deserving of, permitting of, enabling of, respect.

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