After a dozen years in the business, the most prolific filmmaker of our time has just made his first great film.
Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris,” adapted from a Polish novel by Stanislaw Lew that director Andrei Tarkovski used as a source for his 1972 film of the same name, is the type of movie you watch, ponder, then watch again — to take in the visual bliss another time, but also to unravel the depth of meaning buried within the story.
Set in the distant future, the picture stars George Clooney as a psychiatrist commissioned to investigate the strange goings-on aboard a space station where a series of mental and physical breakdowns have afflicted the crew. By the time he arrives at Solaris, the fictional planet where the station has docked, a couple of crew members have died, and those who remain warn him in amused tones about the strange visions that await him as a passenger onboard the ship.
Sure enough, after a restless sleep, during which Clooney recalls the image of his dead wife (the stunning Natascha McElhone), he wakes to find her at his side, in the flesh. Over the course of the next several days, the psychiatrist and his reincarnated wife go through the romantic motions, nearly rekindling their love. Nearly.
Though it wasn’t the director’s finest work, the Tarkovski film preceding this version was hailed by many critics at the time of its release as the Soviet answer to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Actually, both that version and this one are a lot more like Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” with their necrophilic overtones and slow, obsessive mood.
Eventually, the crew realizes the nearby planet is an intelligent entity and Clooney’s wife is a merely a fabrication it has created from the memories provided by his dreams. That explains why she seems to remember parts of their courtship and marriage, but nothing from her own past; and why, despite his wish to love her again, she seems somehow … not there. So much of what we love about other people, after all, stems from the parts kept hidden.
“Solaris” reaches its brilliant emotional peak as the character created by Clooney, whose performance is a beautifully rendered portrait of a man torn between realities, begins to doubt how well he ever knew his wife to begin with — and what that says about his marriage and his life. The film offers us no answers, but one doesn’t mind. Its questions are nourishing enough.
If “Solaris” is a great film, the lion’s share of credit must go to Soderbergh. While he’s demonstrated his technical skill with a wide range of movies — particularly in the flashy yet overpraised “Traffic” — never have style and substance come together like this.
The film’s electronic score is appropriately odd; its languid pace invites contemplation and its disjointed editing gives the flashbacks to Clooney’s marriage an ephemeral poetry the movie requires to make its points about memory, reality and the elusive nature of the truth.
“Solaris” is an outer space movie through and through, but it’s not a hearty actioner in the “Star Wars” mold. It’s the type of sci-fi film that just about went extinct with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — thoughtful, evocative and curious about the possibilities of human experience.
It’s one of the year’s best films.
Jordan Gentile is a senior in journalism. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
