Sometimes an opening shot will tell you everything you need to know about a film. Star Wars had huge spaceships, flashing lasers and chest rattling music. From the very beginning, that was going to be a big, brash, exciting movie. Solaris, by contrast, opens with a shot of rain against a window. If that sets alarm bells ringing, you’d probably better leave now.
Despite the presence in the credits of James Cameron (producer), George Clooney (star) and Stephen Soderbergh (director) this film, from the very opening moment, makes clear that it is not going to be a typical Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. Indeed the stories of numerous American cinema-goers walking out early on this film having been bemused by the glacial pace and introspective storytelling are certain to be repeated in this country whenever a multiplex dares show Solaris. That’s a shame because, while far from perfect, Solaris does something that very few American movies ever attempt. It tries to make the audience think.
This is a film that deals with big questions. What does it mean to be human? How do we love other people when we can never, truly, know them? What is our place in the universe that created us? That Solaris never quite fulfils its ambitions is a disappointment but that it set itself such lofty goals at all is, on its own, enough to make Solaris worth your time and money.
Solaris has great strengths. The cinematography, by Soderbergh himself, is never less than stunning. The design, with numerous references to Kubrick’s 2001, is both beautiful and effective. Soderbergh’s direction is purposefully slow and deliberate but it succeeded, for me, in creating a meditative, trance-like, state in which the questions raised by the film are explored as much by the viewer as by the characters.
The basic story is simple. A psychologist, Chris Kelvin (Clooney), is asked to come to a troubled space station around the watery planet Solaris. Once there he encounters a replica of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) and discovers that the surviving members of the space station crew are having similar experiences.
The film takes its name from the novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem but anyone hoping for a faithful screen representation of Lem’s Solaris will be disappointed. This Solaris is a remake of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film and it retains the emphasis placed by Tarkovsky on Kelvin’s life before his arrival on the space station while playing down the importance of the planet itself.
I’ve watched Soderbergh’s Solaris twice and, in between, I went back and watched the Tarkovsky original. Soderbergh’s version has some significant advantages over its predecessor. As a director, Soderbergh has a much greater interest in creating a visually stunning location for his story and the budget to achieve the look he wants. At more than an hour shorter than the original, the modern Solaris is also both more concise and much clearer in the themes it raises. Soderbergh pares the flab from Tarkovsky’s original and, unburdened of any need or desire to respect Lem’s novel, Soderbergh has – by chance or design – picked out and emphasised those themes which were particular to Tarkovsky but that were often diluted or confused by contradictory messages in the source material. Lem’s story, influenced by his reaction against Stalinism, was fundamentally about the impossibility of human progress and, because of that, the fact that we are doomed never to understand that which is truly different or alien. Both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh, however, are more interested in our inability to understand even those who are closest to us. To that end, in both film versions, we have a far greater concentration on the relationship between the protagonist and his wife.
Lem attacked the way humanity was ducking difficult questions, so that even science had become a faith rather than way of questioning the universe. But both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh make Solaris a story about how we are happier when we stop asking questions and simply make leaps of faith. In the original novel Kelvin’s partial deification of the planet Solaris is a defeat and an absurdity. In the film versions, when Kelvin stops trying to understand what is happening and treats the planet as a higher power, he is rewarded with the contentment he seeks. “There are no answers, only choices,” Kelvin concludes in Soderbergh’s version. That Soderbergh chooses to allow his hero a happy ending with the woman he loves through the power of Solaris might be dismissed as typical Hollywood sentimentality were it not for the fact that Tarkovsky did the same thing though, in his version, Kelvin is somewhat redeemed through his relationship with his father.
Nonetheless, it is ironic that, in making Solaris, two filmmakers have chosen to make this a story about the superiority of faith over reason when it is precisely this conceit that Lem’s original novel attacked. It is the film’s biggest weakness. A philosophy of faith above reason may be appealing – life would, after all, be much simpler if we could rely on others to do our thinking for us – but it is also lazy and dangerous. When we stop asking questions we lose more than our freedom to act as we choose, we lose that which makes us human. Lem’s Solaris makes just this point.
Still, despite the problems, I would recommend Solaris as an interesting and unusual science fiction movie. I do so while warning that many of you may find it tedious and pointing out that many viewers and a few critics have hated the movie. Still, in an era when most Hollywood productions seem to believe that “subtext” is a dirty word, a film that not only asks important questions, but also places them at the heart of the film is to be welcomed.