Solaris (Soderbergh)

Solaris , Saturday 02. January 2010, 23:25

This film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is based on a novel by cult favorite Stanislaw Lem. I read the novel after I saw the movie, and Soderbergh made a film that is different from the novel, not unexpected but perhaps unhappily for Lem's fans. George Clooney plays Dr. Kelvin, a psychologist or psychiatrist, who is called out to deep space to find out what's gone horribly wrong on a space station. People are killing themselves on the station, and the survivors are clearly insane. Kelvin soon finds out why.

The movie unfolds like a flower blooming, but we're still left confused, I'm sorry to say. Lem's point in his novel (at least as I understand it) is that aliens and humans will have absolutely no way to establish communications. Zero chance. None. Totally alien creatures have no basis for understanding, no way to grasp what is intended, and no way to communicate effectively. Soderbergh takes a part of the novel and makes his Solaris a love story of longing and loss. Although Soderbergh does this quite well, he still has hung his story on the frame of Lem's novel, and there's no fit. The alien novel can't support the human film.

As a love story, Soderbergh's Solaris is compelling and heartbreaking as the story of Kelvin and his dead wife Rheya (played by Natascha McElhone) unfolds in bits and pieces of flashback and dreams finally becoming fully developed, and we learn what Kelvin's problem is. Clooney is masterful with his tired, sleep-deprived face showing all Kelvin's internal confusion, loss, and anguish.

But the ship is staffed by the remaining crew of lunatics. Jeremy Davies is particularly good as the totally insane Snow, and Viola Davis does a competent job as Gordon, the only one with a scrap of sanity left. Whatever damage has been wrought by the alien presence is left unexplored and unexplained, and the ending is terribly unsatisfying, despite the tinkling music by Cliff Martinez, which I enjoyed.

Overall, I like the movie, but it can't quite carry the weight of Stanislaw Lem's complex novel.

michuk Sunday 03. January 2010, 01:40

I share most of your thoughts. Solaris is one of the best novels ever written (at least on my personal top 10) and making a movie that is even 50% as good is almost mission impossible. Lem hated Tarkowski's adaptation of "Solaris", he liked Sodenbergh's better, but in general he didn't like the idea of his books being adapted into movies.

We'll see how Ali Folman's of Waltz with Bashir fame) "Futorological Congress" (Folman Tackling Stanislaw Lem!) will come out. This is my second favorite of Lem's novels and the one that "asks for a film adaptation" -- the novel is almost a ready screenplay.