"Solaris"

Sure, it might not have a plot, but Steven Soderbergh's sci-fi reverie floats through space on a cloud of pure cinema.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov 27, 2002 | There's no way to talk about "Solaris," Steven Soderbergh's visually astonishing and thoroughly admirable new film, without giving away some crucial pieces of its story. So if you're a reader who's determined to avoid spoilers of any kind, I advise you to go elsewhere. (Actually, my view is that the spoiler obsession, born of the Internet's fan-geek culture, is the enemy of real criticism, real discussion and maybe even real thought, but that's a subject for another time.) Furthermore, there's a larger point here: There are some movies, more of them than we customarily acknowledge, whose story hardly matters, and "Solaris" is one of them.

Despite his penchant for wistful romance and his tendency to moralize, Soderbergh's real strength as a filmmaker has always been for color and light, form and composition. (See "Traffic," where supernal cinematic art was deployed to send the message that Drugs Are Bad.) On one hand, it seems remarkable, even outlandish, that the same director who remade the Rat Pack caper flick "Ocean's Eleven" would go on to make a new version of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris," a languorous, Soviet-made art film that (like most of Tarkovsky's work) pushes at the outer edges of philosophical abstraction. But in fact they are adjacent chapters in the same larger work, driven by the same iMac ice blues and brilliant crimsons toward an art that's almost purely pictorial. (I will confess here that I took a pass on Soderbergh's last film, "Full Frontal," as did many other people.)

Beneath the surface chatter and the nervous convolutions of plot -- and I don't think Soderbergh cares half as much about plot as he thinks he does -- "Ocean's Eleven" and "Solaris" may in some sense be the same movie. Both are meditations on lost love, in which George Clooney (who is Soderbergh's muse, mirror and canvas, just as much as Marlene Dietrich was Josef von Sternberg's) recovers a dark-eyed beauty from his past. When the characters at the end of "Ocean's Eleven" gaze, with some inscrutable surmise, into that fountain on the Las Vegas Strip, they might as well be staring into the similarly-hued waters of the ocean planet Solaris, where Clooney meets his destiny in the new movie.

Soderbergh spent a reported $47 million of Fox's money on "Solaris." Frankly I applaud him for every nickel -- these days, Hollywood filmmakers routinely spend twice that sum to manufacture crap -- but it's not at all clear how much of that money will be coming back. The studio has primarily promoted the film as a love story starring Clooney and a beautiful woman, which has the virtue of A) being true and B) sounding like something lots of people might want to see. What the publicity doesn't make entirely clear is that most of the movie is set on a mostly deserted space station orbiting a planet that has some kind of psychological and/or spiritual powers (never specified or defined) and that the beautiful woman in question may be an alien creature or a fantasy projection but is in either case the not-quite-convincing simulacrum of a dead person.

In a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, Clooney and Soderbergh sounded almost gleeful about the fact that test audiences came away from "Solaris" thoroughly bewildered. A friend who probably knows movies better than I do (but hasn't seen the Tarkovsky "Solaris" or read the original Stanislaw Lem novel on which both films are based) didn't understand a basic plot point after seeing it.

What's interesting about that -- beyond the schadenfreude of imagining the suits in Burbank sweatily awaiting the film's opening -- is that Soderbergh (who wrote his own screenplay) has gone to some lengths to make the Lem-Tarkovsky material less elliptical and more accessible. He has tried to make psychologist-astronaut Chris Kelvin (Clooney), who takes the lonely voyage to Solaris, a recognizable human character with a specific emotional trauma in his past that shapes his future. Soderbergh's "Solaris" is at least an hour shorter than Tarkovsky's supremely meditative exercise (which, I should make clear, is one of my favorite films) and far more crowded with incident.

Oddly, though, none of that seems to matter. Even in the hands of a professed atheist and humanist like Soderbergh, "Solaris" can never be realism. It remains an oblique, allegorical fable that tangles with various big-ticket topics: mortality, grief, loss, the prodigious creative powers of the mind, the mysterious ways of God, the fact that we are both infinitely far away from the dead and oh so close to them. Perhaps even more than Tarkovsky's film, Soderbergh's feels like a purely formal exercise, a visual and philosophical voyage (in the obvious vein of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey") that begins and ends at the same point, our own planet, which turns out to be no more "real," no less rich and strange, than Solaris itself.

Next Page: You do get a glimpse, and yes, it is firm

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