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Most films nowadays have one purpose in mind: brainless, irresponsible,
leave-your-worries-at-the-door fun. Such films flood the market each
and every Friday for fifty-two weeks a year. From time to time a
variant organism sprouts in this field of mindless entertainment:
the oft-dreaded thinking film. For many, however, the thinking film
is a rare and fascinating creation. It is an unexpected challenge,
a living maze of thought with the entrances and exits overgrown,
its victims still wandering aimlessly within its walls. Steven Soderbergh's
film Solaris is just such a conniving organism. It is a Kubrickian
Venus Flytrap... seducing us with its promise and ensnaring us in
our own contemplation. Its touch and its scent linger in afterthought
long after the curtain draws closed and its audience is loosed back
into the wild. For audiences such as myself, the experience is a
welcome change.
Solaris is the story of psychotherapist Chris Kelvin (George
Clooney), still drowning in the aftermath of his wife's death years
after the fact. Called to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris,
Kelvin discovers only two surviving crew members: a paranoid team
leader (Viola Davis) and a jittery, scatterbrained engineer (Jeremy
Davies, playing yet another character with psychological issues). Both
warn Kelvin of the phenomena which claimed the other crew members
yet the good doctor remains characteristically skeptical... until
the morning he wakes up with his late wife (played with a precise
balance of invigoration and dislocation by Ronin's Natascha
McElhone) sleeping beside him. What follows in Solaris are
forcible moments of introspection, denial, sorrow, and regret...
the presentation of questions which cannot be answered, only faced. Kelvin
is forced to face his past, the decisions he made in that past, and
the seductive possibilities of carving a new path from ethereal memories
made disturbingly whole again.
Despite its cosmic setting and its deeply convincing construction
of earth in the future, Solaris is NOT a science-fiction film. While
sci-fi may serve as the ovum for its conception, the film itself
lies not in what will be but what has been. Its is a genre pulled
inside out, its innards revealed to be not those of salivating alien
creatures but of something deeply and hauntingly human. Existing
on a plane previously occupied by films such as American Beauty and Donnie
Darko, that almost unclassifiable genre of introspection, Solaris is
in no way representative. Whereas common films offer a re-envisioning
of what exists in our world, these films offer us an untainted mirror
then quietly walk away, leaving us to our own constructs. Anyone
watching Solaris looking for answers or signposts pointing
this way or that are looking in the wrong place. The film is often
confusing, and the true nature of the planet Solaris could
definitely be called into question, as could the film's open ending. But
ultimately this lack of answers and a concrete ending are less of
a detriment than they are a defining characteristic. For Solaris to
have a solid ending, happy or sad, would be to betray its own nature
and offer us something tangible that we should ultimately be discovering
for ourselves.
From a filmmaking standpoint, Solaris is yet another construction
from an architect at the top of his game. Adding to his already
eclectic repertoire, Steven Soderbergh ventures into yet another
territory and claims it as his own. His deliberately open-ended
screenplay sets the support for a finely carved film. Succeeding
brilliantly where Brian DePalma's Mission to Mars failed, Soderbergh's Solaris is
by far the closest equivocation of a Stanley Kubrick film to appear
thus far. In many respects it surpasses its predecessor 2001 by
keeping itself acutely restrained. Each shot is masterfully presented
like a moving photograph in its framing, color, and most importantly
its duration. Whereas 2001 laughingly allowed insignificant
shots to drag ad nauseam, Solaris maintains a careful tempo
from shot to shot and reel to reel. Soderbergh also works from a
carefully chosen color palette, each location given a deliberate
amount of life or absence thereof. The muted colors and distinct
lack of musical score in many sequences work in tandem to create
a profound stillness within the film, a stillness which fertilizes
the mind instead of uprooting it in multiple directions of sight
and sound (It must be noted as well that Solaris might be
one the first films in the history of cinema to accurately show oxidized
blood as brown instead of red). Overall, the film creates fertile
soil for a voluntary mind to blossom inwards, but for those minds
seeking a visceral spoon feeding, their sustenance lies elsewhere.
The question to recommend Solaris requires careful consideration:
is the better cinematic experience the roller coaster which carries
us on a preset path, snapping us into its experience and allowing
us to leap away gleefully at the ride's end? Or is the hall of mirrors,
a maze where every turn shows us another part of ourselves, one we
may not have seen before? I choose the latter. Roller coasters
will always exist, always there for us to visit and experience new
twists and turns. But the rarity of Solaris' cinematic hall of mirrors
offer something different, a reflection of ourselves that exists
only for one shimmering moment before it changes, as we change, and
the experience exists only in memory. It is a rare and challenging
voyage, one that anyone looking for just such a voyage should promptly
and open-mindedly undertake.
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