Solaris

simplified excerpts from David Edelstein's ( in slate ? ) review









Is she or isn't she?

The movie is wondrously strange.

Solaris is Steven Soderbergh's ravishing lament for lost love. Solaris is essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

Steven Soderbergh's new James Cameron-produced sci-fi picture is the second adaptation of a 1961 novel by the prolific Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.

A psychologist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) sometime in the future, voyages to a station orbiting a distant, purplish planet (Solaris) in response to a desperate summons from a researcher and old friend. And when he reaches the near-deserted station, he comes face to face with his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), alive and lively.

What is this new Rheya, exactly? A vision? A ghost? Is she matter or mind? And what are the other beings who scuttle around the bloodstained corridors, among them Gibarian's little son? Answers aren't forthcoming from the two other scientists on board, the etherized, cryptic Snow (Jeremy Davies)—"I could tell you what's happening but I don't know if that would tell you what's happening"—or the reclusive, paranoid Gordon (Viola Davis). Even the entities themselves profess little idea how they got to this place. They obviously emanate from the living oceans of Solaris, which seem to be reaching out to the people on the orbiting station with eellike tendrils of vapor. But does the planet have designs on them, for good or ill? Or is it just trying blindly to fill a sort of spiritual vacuum?

Since the novel's publication (oddly, the English version, from 1970, was translated from the French, not the Polish), the themes and devices of Solaris have turned up in countless sci-fi scenarios, from sundry Star Trek plots to Michael Crichton's novel Sphere (made in 1998 into an inert Barry Levinson picture) to its first cinematic adaptation, in 1972, by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky.

Soderbergh's Solaris is regarded as cinematic Valium. But I got on the movie's wavelength and stayed there. To me, it's like listening to a harrowing, minor-key piece of chamber music—a threnody for the dead set against a planet that's like an abstract painting of woe.

Soderbergh took from Lem's descriptions of Solaris' surface, of the palpable yearning under the movement of the planet's mists:

On the fifteenth day … I woke up earlier than usual, exhausted by the previous
night's dreams. All my limbs were numbed, as if from the effects of a powerful
narcotic. The first rays of the red sun shone through the window, a blanket of
red flame rippled over the ocean, and I realized that the vast expanse which had
not been disturbed by the slightest movement in the past four days was beginning
to stir. The dark ocean was abruptly covered by a thin veil of mist which seemed
at the same time to have a very palpable consistency. Here and there the mist
shook, and tremors spread out to the horizon in all directions. Now the ocean
disappeared altogether beneath thick, corrugated membranes with pink swellings
and pearly depressions, and these strange waves suspended above the ocean
swirled suddenly and coalesced into great balls of blue-green foam. A tempest of
wind hurled them upwards to the height of the Station, and wherever I looked,
immense membranous wings were soaring in the red sky … as if the ocean were
mutating, or shedding an old scaly skin. … Wings of foam planed all around me,
only a few yards from the window, and one swooped to rub against the window pane
like a silken scarf. As the ocean went on giving birth to these fantastic birds,
the first flights were already dissipating high above, decomposing at their
zenith into transparent filaments

Matching George Clooney with Natascha McElhone was a glorious idea. He's dark Irish and impudently mortal; she's of the fair, rare, chiseled variety; but they're both in the same Hibernian key. Her face, with its sharp planes, is angular and rather mysterious. Even when Soderbergh flashes back to their first meeting—when she is unambiguously alive—there is something vital hidden away, from herself as well as her suitor. So their gropings onboard the ship become an extension of their earthly relationship: She was a phantom before she was a phantom.

There isn't a lot of extraneous dialogue in Solaris­—the vacuum of space sucks the small talk out of the air—and most of the movie is Clooney staring into space. For real. In flashback, the fate of the real Rheya turns on a decision that doesn't get the dramatic weight it deserves. And the timeline in the movie's last 10 minutes is confusing, as if Soderbergh simply recycled early footage: Is it fantasy, flashback, or flash-forward? Or does Soderbergh think there's no difference?

He might not, and that's mostly a good thing. He shoots fluid sequences, but he's not afraid to nip and tuck them, to find a flashback or a flash-forward that can rupture an instant and thereby give it infinite resonance.

Soderbergh in Solaris can bring the past literally to life: a past that can't be buried or cast off, that is destined to rise and rise again like the curly wisps of vapor from the oceans of Solaris.