Steven Soderbergh’s version of Stanisław Lem’s novel is a quiet, cold, carefully made film about grief, and it is better than its reputation. Most critics found it chilly; we found it sad, and were still sad the next morning.
Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris takes Stanisław Lem’s novel, which Andrei Tarkovsky filmed in 1972 at close to three hours, and brings it in at 99 minutes. A psychologist called Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is asked to a space station where the dead have started arriving in the night. Soderbergh wrote it, shot it and cut it himself, and it has the concentration of a film made by one pair of hands. It is a good film, quieter and sadder than most science fiction, and it was met on release with a coolness we do not think it earned.
Philip Messina’s station is a ring of dim corridors lit in blue, with round doorways and surfaces that give back reflections, so that people are often seen twice. Soderbergh shoots Earth in rain and in the amber of kitchens and dinner parties, and the station in steel and shadow; you always know which world you are in by the colour of the light. Cliff Martinez’s score is the film’s best decision. Soft pulses, metallic chimes, a rising tone that never quite settles, played under long scenes where nothing is said, doing the work that dialogue does in most films of this size.
Clooney gives Kelvin almost nothing to do with his face, and that is the performance. He arrives on the station like a man who has already given up and is going through the forms. Natascha McElhone has the harder part. Rheya is a woman who is not sure she is a woman, and McElhone plays her with a frightened hopefulness, watching Kelvin to learn how she is supposed to behave. Viola Davis’s Gordon wants the problem solved by whatever means are to hand and does not soften once. Jeremy Davies’s Snow mumbles, flutters his hands and is either the least or the most frightened person aboard. Ulrich Tukur’s Gibarian has a handful of scenes and a recorded message, and both stay with you.
Here is what got at us. Kelvin remembers meeting Rheya on a train, and Soderbergh hands the whole scene to Martinez and to two faces: she looks, he looks, a door handle, not a word. It is cut into the station scenes so that the memory keeps interrupting the present, which is how memory behaves. We found it moving in a way we had not braced for, and the later memories, the dinner party, the flat, the argument, grew harder to sit through each time they came back, because by then we knew where they led. Grief on film is usually loud. Here it is a man sitting still.
It has faults. The script is the weakest of Soderbergh’s four jobs on it, and there are exchanges about God and consciousness on the station that sound like a seminar and have the effect of one. Snow’s mannerisms are pitched high enough to grate on a second viewing. The film’s Earth is thinly sketched: rain, a train, a kitchen, a hospital corridor, one session with a patient (Kent Faulcon) that tells us Kelvin’s trade and little more. Milena Canonero’s costumes do some of the missing work, dark coats on Earth, soft everyday clothes on the station and no uniforms anywhere, so the crew look like people who happen to be in space.
Most critics did not warm to it, and the reviews divide almost evenly between those who found a tender film about memory and those who found it cold, hollow and short on chemistry between the leads. We think the second group wanted a different film. Kelvin could not love his wife well when she was alive; the story asks whether he can do better with something that looks like her. There is little chemistry between Clooney and McElhone because there was little in the marriage, and the film says so in the memories it keeps returning to.
Tarkovsky’s film spent its length on the planet. Soderbergh spends his on the marriage, and the planet is mostly a light through a window. The last stretch takes a turn we will not describe, which some have called a cheat and we found earned. Watch it at home, late, with the lights off, and do not expect to be told what to think. It carries a 12A and it will not raise your pulse once, which in this case we mean as a recommendation.
