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Solaris
***1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of March 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. USA.
99 minutes. Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh; based on the novel
by Stanislaw Lem. Starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Viola Davies,
Jeremy Davies, Ulrich Tukur.
Trends move in cycles, be they in politics, clothing,
society, art, whatever. Now that we have had a decade of irony at the movies,
with pretty much every prevalent talent and hack attempting to imitate the
thunder of Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction", it is time to move on. Sarcasm
has become stale, as everything does when it is reduced to a bandwagon, and
maybe existentialism is getting itself ready for a comeback.
Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris" may
not single-handedly bring intellectual pondering back to the movies, but
it raises a hand in the crowd, and lets us know that the concept is not dead.
One day, we are reminded, it will return. The film is serious, otherworldly,
fascinated and fascinating. It has the courage to wonder about big questions
with sincerity and devotion. It risks seeming slow and pretentious, because
it thinks the gamble is worth the promise.
George Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a psychologist
living at some point in the future who is asked to travel to a space station
based around the planet of Solaris. Disturbances have been reported by the
crew; the planet is a vaguely comprehensible living entity that seems to
be reacting to the studies of outsiders. Clooney goes on the mission, and
finds that the astronauts are living a combination of slow madness and desperate
resignation. Two crew members have killed themselves. The two that remain
are reluctant to say anything, but when they do, they speak in fearful awe
of their surroundings, and make reference to hallucinations of living
beings.
The first night of Clooney's stay arrives. He
catches a restless sleep, plagued by dreams of his dead wife Rheya (Natasha
McElhone). And then he awakes, to find her lying next to him. She insists
that she is the wife. Clooney knows that it cannot be. She begins to wonder
about the hollowness and uncertain point of view that lingers in her memories
of life, and begins to wonder if maybe she is not the real Rheya after all.
And then Clooney becomes more convinced that she is Rheya -- or, at least,
a workable substitute.
McElhone's character is a dimensional, fascinating
concept rather than a simple gimmick, and the question of her level of reality
dominates the whole movie. She is not just a hallucination of Clooney, because
the others see her too. And yet she is not Rheya, because, well, the real
Rheya is dead and buried on Earth. The screenplay springs her on us as a
surprise, explains her scientifically and then gets back to being astonished
by the implications of her existence -- she is Kelvin's memory of Rheya,
which the planet of Solaris has sensed through telepathy and turned into
flesh and blood through subatomic manipulation. She can think, feel, analyse,
judge. The images in her memory are indeed those of Rheya's past. And yet
she has been conjured by sensations from Kelvin's brain.
Reverberating through the material are all kinds
of philosophical issues, like the fact that everyone we know exists for us
only in our own minds, and everyone to everyone else is experienced through
human senses, and the interpretation that goes with senses as they are filtered
through the brain. Humans define what is real through experience, but since
all experience is subjective, our individual ideas of reality may be exclusive
to ourselves. If our ideas of people could be turned into new living things,
without any other influences, to what extent would they be real? And would
we make the same mistakes with the conjured people that we made with the
original ones? Which is to say, do we make mistakes with people because of
their real personalities or our reactions to what we wrongly assume to be
their personalities?
You can drive yourself nuts thinking about stuff
like this, and because it is tempting to not bother, a movie like "Solaris"
is not for everyone. I found it hypnotic. The kind of things Soderbergh wants
to cover have not been in any kind of vogue in cinema since the 1970s, and
indeed it was 1972 when the source material was last filmed. Andrei Tarkovsky,
the great but difficult Russian director, made a legendary two-and-a-half-hour
epic of "Solaris" -- tough to watch, hard not to admire.
Both versions of the movie invade the minds of
audience members through pacing and visual styles that are entranced by the
intensity of spaces and moments. Tarkovsky was the slower filmmaker, and
his story revealed itself through meditation. Soderbergh, whose film runs
for 99 minutes, is more focused on the purposes of his shots -- and yet he
captures a similar sense of lingering inside atmosphere, with quiet, eerie,
reflective moments of patient visual storytelling.
There are stunning, spiralling images of the colours
of outer space in "Solaris". A musical score that hums with low, disturbing
synthesised charge. There is the anguished face of George Clooney as he does
a lot of waiting around on the space station, plagued with its ambience and
frustrated by the unsolvable dilemmas that are being thrust upon him by both
cosmic phenomena and the pains of his own heart. If you want to be sneering,
call it a highbrow stoner movie. For the curious, it will have the power
to arrest the senses and fascinate the mind.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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