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Solaris: Another View
Fundamentally, it's about a man (George Clooney) mourning about his suicide wife (Natascha McElhone, best known from the incomparably better Ronin). The science fiction is there only to provide a mirror for Clooney's moping about his lost love. It could have been done with drugs, dreams, insanity, spirits, reincarnation, or any number of other conceits (and in other movies, it has been done, with all of those), but Solaris does it with a huge sentient planet capable of reading minds and reforming matter at subatomic levels. What does this stupendous cosmic power do? Create replicas of whoever the people on the nearby space station dream about. Like Clooney's dead wife.
This is a bit like using a Jedi Knight and her light saber to get at a can of soup.
The Jedi Knight and the light saber will definitely get the can, and get it open in a jiffy. But the contents are a mess. And one never seems to have a light saber around when one needs one. Much less a light saber attached to a willing Jedi Knight -- "Follow our mandate from the Jedi Council, we must! Mmmm!"
Like the light saber and the soup can, Solaris the sentient planet mostly just gets in the way of the real substance of the film. Solaris the planet looks pretty on the screen, but so does iTunes when you turn on the visualizations -- they've got about the same level of emotional content. We need clumsy faux-jargon exposition: "Are you or are you not made of sub-atomic particles?" (of course -- everything is made of subatomic particles, usually organized in the form of atoms, duh) -- to even know that Solaris the planet has anything to do with what is going on.
Comparisons with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are as inevitable as they are inaccurate. Both films are set in space. And both films have a slow pace, driven largely by beautifully shot scenes of some space-scape. But that's the extent of the similarity. If this is Soderbergh's tribute to Kubrick, it falls short. Thematically, they have little to do with each other. Kubrick's long space shots establish tone and realism for a film shot before the Apollo moon walks. They are always placed to make a point relevant to the plot, whether it is the mind-numbing isolation of a long space journey or a parallel between the first bone weapons of proto-humans and the incomparably more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction of the near future. Soderbergh's long space shots show off some very pretty particle system effects and convince us, over and over again, that, despite all indications to the contrary, this film is taking place in a Strange Place.
What interesting shots Soderbergh does come up with tend to be film-studenty tricks like a dream-like tracking shot that suggests that there might be more than one replica of a particular character. Of course, by the point we start seeing these kinds of shots, we've already seen multiple replicas of the same character come and go. And he never goes anywhere with it. Even the supposedly trick ending is as obvious as the end of The Sixth Sense ("I see dead people" -- well, duh, we can see what the end is right there). Soderbergh brings this loaded gun on stage and never really fires it. The science fiction conceit of this super-powerful planet never goes anywhere.
Which just brings us back to the fact that this isn't really a science fiction movie. It's a character study. Unfortunately, I don't think Clooney's a good enough actor to really pull that off. He's got tremendous charisma and screen presence. But he doesn't do emotional depth well, and when he does, it either comes across as lust (the problem with his role in Out of Sight) or as bad melodrama (which is his problem here). The other actors are decent -- Jeremy Davies is good in a truly neurotic and twitchy role, but saying Jeremy Davies is good at playing neurotic is like saying that Jack Nicholson is good at playing crazy macho -- they can sleep through the role and still do it. McElhone is suitably cryptic, but again, it's something she does well. Viola Davis strikes me as perhaps the best of the lot, but I'm unfamiliar with her work, so she may be similarly snoozing through the role.
Soderbergh started his film career with a bit of sexual obsession, in the highly-regarded sex, lies, and videotape (yes, the title is all in lowercase -- never seen a satisfactory explanation for that little bit of conceit either). In the end, Solaris comes across much the same. Clooney sees McElhone on a train, they play a little eye footsie, and end up going to the same party at the home of a mutual friend. Breathy lines and bare butts soon ensue. Eventually, McElhone kills herself over a misunderstanding (Clooney walks out in a snit and she thinks he's not coming back). This is barely sexual obsession, and more like a pretentious drama student trying to redo the tragedies of Shakespeare. It just isn't compelling, and Clooney getting emotional distraught over it was silly (the New York audience I was with broke out into laughter -- maybe that's just New York cynicism, but I don't think so).
So in the end, what are we left with? Some pretty pictures of a purple planet. George Clooney's angst-ridden mug. A "trick" ending that is broadcast throughout the movie. And a conceit somewhat larger than a fully grown blue whale, lying in the middle of the movie doing nothing.
I wanted to like it, really I did. Soderbergh has done better, and we sure can use better directors on science fiction films than we usually get. Alas, this ain't it.
Slashdot welcomes reader-submitted features and reviews. Thanks to nellardo for this one!
The link to Stansilaw Lem novel goes to http://slashdot.org/index.pl
Were is the real link?
solaristhemovie.com
he was Polish.
he really was Polish. Apparently the English version of Solaris was translated from a French translation of the original Polish novel.
http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/solaris.html
Can we add reviewers to our killfile?
XML causes global warming.
The role was a gutsy move for George Clooney
I'm glad somebody else realized this, too. Did you notice the way Clooney performed the last scene of the film straight into the camera? Usually when you're shooting a scene with two actors, one of them stands or sits behind or beside the camera to give the other actor an eye-line, and a performance to act against. Then they move the camera and shoot the scene again from the reverse angle, this time with the first actor behind the camera. Both angles are shot slightly off-center, because the actors are making eye contact with each other, and not with the camera. It's a hell of a lot harder to act looking at a camera lens than at another person.
But that last scene had Clooney acting right into the camera. It was an incredibly powerful scene. His performance was just outstanding.
Few Slashdotters will realize this, though, and even fewer will appreciate it. But it's there, it's there.
(Shameless plug here: if you liked Solaris at all-- or even if you didn't but are willing to listen to a slightly different take on it-- you might be interested in my recent journal entry about it.)
I write in my journal
Because most Americans have 28-screen cinemas and corporate video rental stores near their homes -- but the theater chains won't devote even 1 out of the 28 to anything that isn't Hollywood pap. The only way to see a movie that isn't written and directed by teenagers is to live near the art-house theaters of Manhattan or West Hollywood, or wait for it to (possibly) show up on cable. Whether or not a picture qualifies as True Art House is a question for purists and film school dropouts.