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Solaris
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
Running Time: 2:00
Country: USA
Year: 2002
Web: Official Site
Based on: Novel
Based on: Film
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By approaching Andrei Tarkovski's classic Solaris, Steven Soderbergh has created an unexpected clone, a respectful and bare variation that never pretends to challenge the original but is equipped with its own individuality and beauty.
Based on Stanislaw Lem's eponymous novel and using Tarkovski's adaptation, the film follows Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychologist sent to a space station near the planet Solaris to investigate strange phenomena. There he will discover the existence of mysterious uninvited guests, including Rheya the dead wife (Natascha McElhone) he's been mourning for a few years.
Admittedly, beforehand the concept of Soderbergh remaking Solaris looked like a lost cause, an unlikely challenge that would either result in some popcorn Hollywood sacrilege or some pretentious egocentric attempt to match a classic. Instead, Soderbergh who also wrote the script, decided to focus on the catalyst of Solaris, the relationship with the reincarnated wife, which in the original was hardly touched to serve a higher purpose. Thus, the filmmaker doesn't betray the original—and deftly escapes the ire of cinephiles—but rather offers a complementary piece whose purpose is, in part, to tease the audience and help it rediscover the original adaptation. Working the system—Hollywood—from the inside at making mainstream cinema a better place, Soderbergh stands as a cinema idealist.
The filmmaker takes one of the most charismatic stars and turns him into some dry character in a slow-paced esoteric love story, and a science-fiction film without special effects. Clooney has successfully stripped himself of his usual irony and charm to create a dry and boring character who almost looks Russian in a way and contrasts with the glamorous beauty of the much more complex character finely played by McElhone. Solaris is definitely not for sci-fi geeks and trekkies who dare to venture into the theater might end up eating their Spock ears after the first 20 minutes. This isn't Ocean's 11 in space either, which as the director probably anticipated, compromises any box office success, and makes it a labor of love.
Solaris is a film about the sense of loss and second chances, set against a cerebral background. The influence of the planet Solaris makes memories of loved ones materialize in unexplained ways. The visitors are neither humans nor identical clones but rather individual entities born from biased perceptions and memories. In a self-reflexive way, Solaris as a planet has the same influence on Chris Kelvin as Solaris—the original film—has on Soderbergh. The director builds his film around his own perception of the story and it wouldn't be surprising if this film had haunted him for many years.
The reincarnation of Rheya is only a pretext to show how far a man is ready to go for a second chance. The film is built around the love story and uses flashbacks to help understand Chris's remorse and sense of loss. Soderbergh, as a cinematographer—he uses a pseudonym, shows his aesthetic vision that often transfers in his films. The flashbacks are stylishly shot, using blurs and a subdued light to create a dreamlike atmosphere that is important to the story. Since the Rheya visitor created through Chris' memory is a biased version of his wife we cannot even be sure that these flashbacks are accurate. In addition the world they show seems to be somewhat warmer and more civilized than what is shown of his life in his apartment and at the space station.
Soderbergh's Solaris has its own visual beauty and proves that artistic integrity is still alive. But one of the problems is that, by focusing on one part of the original story, the film leaves some things unexplained and lacks a sense of purpose. Some spectators might be left in the dark and the complementary nature of the project makes watching Tarkovski's Solaris a necessity to see the big picture. Tarkovski's movie was indeed a much more complex and ambitious piece. His overly long and slow-paced version featured extended shots of nature and civilization that ultimately created the beauty of the ensemble and served its purpose. The film that must be experienced to be appreciated offers richer ambivalent themes, from politics (opposition between capitalism and communism) to a dangerous modernization of civilization (recurrent shots of nature, city traffic and space are used to emphasize that contrast) and religion (the need to explain abnormal phenomena with religion beliefs). An underlying horror aura was also present in the first adaptation and cannot be found here. The original ending was also subtler, while Soderbergh makes it more concrete. His film will forever stay in the shadow of its illustrious predecessor, but as the labor of love of a film buff, it is certainly one of the rare decent adaptation of a classic.
Fred Thom
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Solaris review
