Solaris
It’s easy to scoff at Monarch Notes, but before I quit graduate school in disgust I reached for them every time I thought a professor might be ruining a literary masterpiece for me–and vowed to read the work later, on my own time, for my own reasons. As a teacher, I also used them when I suspected a student of plagiarism, and they did help me spot an offender or two. But having read the outlines, I rarely read the works–the crib had robbed me of the desire.
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It’s also true that SF art movies–which offer a thoughtful alternative to the usual action-packed SF romps–don’t come along every day, though back in the 60s and early 70s filmmakers as diverse as John Boorman, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Losey, George Lucas, Tarkovsky, and Francois Truffaut all tried their hands at them. Moreover, Soderbergh’s film is deliberately constructed like a dream, with its own peculiar logic and funereal tone–though he hasn’t bothered to ground it enough in everyday life on earth to make the trip into outer space feel like much of a departure. He seems glued to a mood; his notion of reality consists mainly of dank urban rain and gloomy interiors out of Blade Runner, and his sense of outer space is strictly 2001. He starts cribbing from Tarkovsky in earnest only when he gets to the space station that’s the film’s main location.
Soderbergh has one theoretical advantage over Lem and Tarkovsky–terseness–and viewers can have a bit of fun watching him try to squeeze the essence out of Tarkovsky’s meditative poetry. Soderbergh’s film lasts only 99 minutes–90 minutes less than Tarkovsky’s and much less than it would take to read Lem’s 200-page novel. In Tarkovsky’s film more than 40 minutes elapse before Kris Kelvin, the hero, takes off into outer space to investigate and possibly rescue the scientists on a space station circling the planet Solaris. Soderbergh’s Kelvin arrives there before we’ve even had a chance to get acquainted with him. Just about all we know is that he’s a troubled shrink (no longer a psychologist) who lives alone, but since this time he’s George Clooney–working up a photogenic sweat at every opportunity and going off the deep end before he’s shown us whether he’s playing a good shrink or a lousy one–I guess we aren’t supposed to care.
By contrast, Tarkovsky gets some of his loveliest and most memorable moments from such everyday details as the tremulous swaying of underwater leaves and the endless rush of an anonymous urban freeway–both poetically shaped to suggest drifting through outer space. The nearest Soderbergh comes to trying for such an effect are close-ups of raindrops hitting a window that are used to frame the action, yet he can’t resist lighting and directing the raindrops as if they were little George Clooneys or little beads of sweat on George Clooney. Several months ago Clooney suggested in an interview that people shouldn’t worry about Soderbergh ruining a classic because Solaris wasn’t one of Tarkovsky’s better pictures. I assume all these vivid splats of moisture are his idea of an improvement.
