Ray Pride

What is more beautiful than the one who has gone away?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, fantasy forgives, desire embellishes. Sentiments like these lie at the heart of "Solaris," Steven Soderbergh's marital drama in a science-fiction setting. It's more "Scenes from an Intergalactic Marriage" than a revisiting of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, with Soderbergh's usual take on female-male relationships as being essentially parasitic. Soderbergh's "Solaris," which draws conspicuously from Tarkovsky's script with only a modest credit to its current rights holders, is a different beast from the Russian master's fatiguing 165-minute version.

In reviews of Soderbergh's "Solaris," countless comparisons are being made to the earlier picture, which has just been reissued in a comprehensive Criterion DVD edition. Tarkovsky quests for the spiritual in his handful of films. 2002's "Solaris," by contrast, takes on a narrower focus, a chilly skepticism about relationships that reigns in so much of Soderbergh's work--the eternal, inviolable unknowability of another.

"Solaris," measured in its pacing, begins in a future Chicago of "Blade Runner" broodiness, a site of gleaming horizontals, indirect lighting and sluicing gray rain. The place of memory is a place of rain, the place of dreaming is drown. Rain falls like tears, a vale of translucence.

Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychiatrist whose troubled wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) died a few years before the story begins; he's still steeped in his private funk. A space station named Prometheus, circling the water planet Solaris, has cut off communication with Earth, and a cryptic video dispatch to Kelvin insists he's the only person who can right what's wrong. Once he's on the ship, after meeting the two remaining scientists on board (Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis) hallucinations are the order of the day, including one of his late wife, who can recall only what parts of her life her husband knew. "I'm not the person I remember," this apparition insists.

The production design is doleful, abundant in its cool dread. (Note Rheya's first appearance on a train, a black handprint shimmering on a transparent divider as she leaves Kelvin's sight.) The prolific Soderbergh is a hands-on breakneck auteurist but also a superlative director of photography, with astonishingly beautiful metalline-gleaming cinematography, like the 35mm "fictional" portions of "Full Frontal."

Darts of hate have been shot toward this sleek, dreamily paced film, such as the pitiless pissiness exhibited by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Reader. Roger Ebert took from this "Solaris" much the same feelings I did, aligning it with Soderbergh's obsessions, yet other reviews have been rife with a manner of possessive, you-don't-know-art exclusionary attacks that seem removed from criticism, yet very near clubbiness. It almost seems a kind of Rorschach for critics, ascertaining canonical reverence versus a filmmaker's right to explore a text after one's own fashion. (Should one never see a "Hamlet" after the first time, in high school, or college?)

Rosenbaum describes the admittedly slow 95-minute film as "funereal," and goes on to describe Viola Davis, a vivid actress even when standing motionless, as "a PC replacement for a white male in the original." Ascribing authorial intentions is a dangerous thing. To presume Soderbergh chooses actors for political reasons rather than talent seems specious, as does giving weight to whatever flip remarks Clooney has made about the 1972 "Solaris" being a lesser Tarkovsky film. The telegraphic quality rankles some critics, epigrammatic declarations such as "We are in a situation beyond morality!"; "It's the puppet's dream, being human"; "There are no answers, only choices"; and "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me!"

Soderbergh's film--let's not even call it a "version"--is earnest work. Its look is crisp, its actors striking. Jeremy Davies' discombobulated mannerist acting is freakish in its gestural specificity, and Clooney plays a man who stopped reacting after his wife died. McElhone, as a fantasy projection, is lit as a fantasy creature: a human being Kelvin could never decipher, a woman who he could only revere, and in the process, find the substantial abyss in their relationship to be a source of irritation.

It was intriguing to see the rapt attention of the paying audience I saw the film with, a rare treat for a reviewer. "I could tell you what's happening but I don't know that will tell you what's happening," Davies says early on. Even the sound design is muffling, distant, that of enplaned white noise, the soft yet damp susurration of travel thirty thousand feet or higher from earth's surface. Cliff Martinez's steel-drum echoic Steve Reich-like ache is one more strand of melancholy, one further swath of mood that makes "Solaris" closer to the work of Soderbegh colleague Mike Nichols than the mysticism of Tarkovsky or the frosty skepticism of Kubrick. There's truly only one indication, late in the film, that the earthbound portions are set in Chicago, when a subway train rushes past a transparent backdrop of the Merchandise Mart El station: zschoom, zschoom, zschoom. In the end, there is neither life nor death, merely love in the city in a garden. The stubborn enigma in elusive riddles. The sorrow in the dream that is memory.

"Solaris" is now playing.

(2002-12-04)

Also by Ray Pride

Turn into the slide
A few years back, I'd been seeing someone for a while. We weren't getting along. I needed to leave Chicago, even if it meant going with her. We packed the car and after the afternoon rush hour passed, started to drive out of the city to the South.
(2002-11-26)

Perfectly mediocre
At the age of 40, James Bond's in the midst of a colorful midlife crisis, but at least in "Die Another Day," partner-in-smirk Halle Berry can hold her own against Pierce Brosnan's increasingly craggy demeanor.
(2002-11-20)

Tip of the Week
"Quitting," Zhang Yang's third feature (following "Shower"), is bold, impassioned and vivid in its portrayal of a damaged life brought back to health.
(2002-11-13)

Imitation of Life
"Far From Heaven" is a miracle, an unlikely proof of Borges' unflappably wry short story, "Pierre Menard, the Author of Quixote," in which his driven protagonist attempts to write Cervantes' "Don Quixote" word for word in the modern age.
(2002-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2002-11-06)

Purty mouth
(2002-11-06)

Tip of the Week
(2002-10-30)

Spy-eyed
(2002-10-30)

Tip of the Week
(2002-10-23)

Nice picture
(2002-10-23)

Tip of the Week
(2002-10-16)

Anger mismanagement
(2002-10-16)

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