Lonely Planet

Let’s not mince words: Solaris is a boring movie. But it’s the best kind of boring movie, the kind that gives you plenty to think about, and plenty of time to think about it. Though it shaves more than an hour off the Andrei Tarkovsky movie from which it’s adapted (few directors are as brilliantly boring as Tarkovsky), Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris crams a lot of open space into its hundred-odd minutes. Just the shots of a space station slowly revolving above a coruscating gas giant seem to go on for days, an apt reflection of a drama that’s more about contemplation than confrontation.

There's no question that in remaking Tarkovsky's cherished original, Soderbergh has both souped it up and trimmed it down, but the result is still the most stylistically daring studio movie since Moulin Rouge. The first movie Soderbergh has written and directed since 1996's Schizopolis, it's also the most complete use of his talents since The Limey, and a welcome rebound from the misbegotten Full Frontal. Though fans of Tarkovsky's film will no doubt grouse that Soderbergh has turned the story into soap opera, what he's actually done is deftly locate the emotional core without sloughing off its philosophical elements. The result is a movie that can be mentioned in the same breath as 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, at least for Kubrick skeptics like myself, surpasses it).

Now, about that emotional core. George Clooney, in a performance of stunning vulnerability, plays Chris Kelvin, an Earthbound psychiatrist called to investigate a disturbance on a space station orbiting the distant planet Solaris, where a crew sent to study it has all but fallen out of contact. (In a clever twist, the project, originally a government undertaking, has been auctioned off to a corporation interested in assessing the planet's "commercial potential.") Kelvin (note the absolute-zero surname) is called in because of his relationship with Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), the mission commander who's sent a cryptic, paranoid S.O.S. to Earth. Fortunately, Kelvin seems to have little to leave behind -- his apartment is sterile, bachelor-pad stuff, and even his group therapy sessions are held in a yawning, fluorescent-lit room big enough to play football in. Clooney has never seemed as lonely and as lost as he does here; the shadows cling to his face like icicles, his trademark insouciance replaced by guilt and a gnawing uncertainty.

Arriving on board the orbiting Prometheus, Kelvin finds no answers, just a lot of open space. There are blood stains, the remnants of the "security force" sent in before him, and a couple of bodies in the ship's morgue, but neither of the ship's two remaining crew members is disposed to tell Kelvin what went on. "I could tell you what's happening," says Snow (Jeremy Davies), "but I don't know if that'd really tell you what's happening." Gordon (Viola Davis) is slightly more lucid: "Until it starts happening to you, there's really no point in describing it."

Those warnings might apply equally to Solaris as a whole. Divulging the film's scant, and slowly unraveling, plot might provide a sense of structure, but it wouldn't do a thing to explain the film's delicate layers of meaning, or the deftness with which Soderbergh flips between Kelvin's ordeal on the ship and his life back on Earth. Mirrors and reflections are constantly evoked in images and in dialogue, but they're less reflections than refractions, overlapping pieces of an inconceivable whole.

In a diary entry he's left behind, Gibarian muses on the way space travel reveals humanity's inability to imagine outside its own experience: "We don't want other worlds," he says. "We want mirrors." In flashback, one of Kelvin's friends pompously mocks his wife (Natasha McElhone) for conceiving God as "a man in a long white beard," but offers no alternatives, preferring to mock her attempts to grapple with spirituality rather than formulate his own. But in the light of Solaris, such evasions are fruitless. Not only is it clear that the planet is causing the delusions that have affected the entire crew and soon set to work on Kelvin, but Solaris is responsive to their presence: It's an intelligent world.

Gordon responds with a soldier's bravado; Snow by doing his best to go native. (Davies might be channeling Frederic Forrest in Apocalypse Now.) Kelvin, as he is wont to do, thinks. Though he's been sent to salvage the mission, his conversations with the remaining crew members are cursory, unproductive. A voice from beyond the grave warns him, "If you try to solve it, you'll die out here," but the advice takes a long time to sink in. He's not used to accepting the inexplicable. Gordon wants to beat Solaris, to prove she's "smarter than it is"; Snow goes slack-jawed and marvels passively. (When Kelvin questions him about the blood smeared all over the entrance bay, he responds "Yeah ... blood. How about that.") But Kelvin can't help but press on, even as he's told, "There are no answers -- only choices."

As that line indicates, Soderbergh's dialogue has a tendency to flirt with New Age clichés, and Gordon's gruff militarism skirts caricature. (At one point, she barks, "I wanna win -- I want humans to win.") But the film's language is mainly visual, and there it speaks eloquently. In Traffic and Ocean's Eleven, Soderbergh showed an unparalleled skill for cramming narrative into discrete bursts; he does the same here, only instead of making room for character or action sequences, he's making room for... room. The film's strategy is to bury its revelations in the background or else stack them on top of each other, and then give you plenty of time to sort them out, as the characters do the same. Rather than put the audience in the position where the characters are trying to figure out something we already know, we're united with Kelvin in his quest to make sense of Solaris (and, in our case, Solaris), and his eventual decision to submit rather than dissect.

That Solaris is a substantially budgeted film and is being released like a holiday blockbuster is something of a miracle, if not a folly -- you can bet if Soderbergh and Clooney hadn't given Warner Bros. Ocean's Eleven (and if James Cameron weren't one of the producers), the movie would've been hacked to bits like Walter Hill's Supernova. It's something of a miracle that it even exists, even more that it's being smuggled into malls across the country as the new George Clooney flick. Where Full Frontal fiddled around with Harvey Weinstein's pocket change, Solaris cashes in all of Soderbergh's chips; it's as if every movie he's made since The Limey has been designed to give him enough clout to make this one. Consider it capital well spent.

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August 15, 2002
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