Solaris (2002)

For me, I couldn't give Steven Soderbergh all of what he was asking for in "Solaris." The pregnant pauses, the exquisite, frozen tableaux, the elliptical dialogue, the deliberate pacing, the carefully inert colors, the oppressive sussurances of machinery, the fuzzy, unresolved dissonances—all of it commands you to pay exquisitely detailed attention, even when little seems to be happening, as even tiny disturbances cast ripples through the silences that surround them, and we are asked to find the arc of the story in a field of particular events. I found my own thoughts creeping into the stillnesses, prosaic thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow, and I looked up whenever someone was speaking, and I had time to think whole rounded thoughts in between speech many times. Other people may find their theatergoing experiences different, but Soderbergh's pace, more than anything else, is what defines this movie.

Apparently, for many viewers, pace also defined Andrei Tartovsky's original adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel. (More on the novel in a moment.) Given Soderbergh's approach to adapting Lem's "Solaris" — it's a free lifting of elements from the book, not even close to a text-faithful rendering — one might presume that this film is more of a remake of Tartovsky's two-and-a-half-hour odyssey. I haven't seen the Tartovsky, but the film "Solaris" most resembles in Soderbergh's oeuvre is "The Limey," which also explored the circular nature of time and regret and love in what could have been a linear narrative in a less imaginative director's hands. In "The Limey," however, the splicing and reordering was palpably (and intrusively) the product of Soderbergh's intervention, whereas in "Solaris" he's found a surrogate: the titular planet, pulsing with arcs and sprays beneath a space station, and apparently trying to communicate with the humans orbiting it by creating real-to-the-senses ghosts of people they remember.

Soderbergh isn't too much concerned about the planet, though. He's more interested in what happens when Kris Kelvin (George Clooney), the psychiatrist who's supposed to right the minds of the disturbed crew, comes on board and is visited by his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone). The other crew members, Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis), have their own methods for dealing with their visitors (spacing out and attempting to destroy them, respectively), but Kris, after an initial horror, falls into the trap of luxuriating in his wife's presence, for reasons that, in sequential flashbacks, become all too clear.

Love lost is the key here, the yearning and pain and sweet fiery memory the shapers of the narrative and tone and pace in Soderbergh's "Solaris." Every unresolved moment pulses with that sadness, even in the first part of the movie when we don't know why and all we see is a handsome man with a sorrow-lined face and a tired voice trying to pretend he knows what to do. In fact, Soderbergh relies almost entirely on the faces of Clooney and McElhone for psychological exposition; in stillnesses like these, the evanescent flicker of a smile can break a heart.

But ultimately, Soderbergh, unlike Lem, wants us to see how Kris could believe that this was his wife come back; Soderbergh, in fact, sees the only flaw in the visitor as her inability to remember well the life she led with Kris. All other questions get lost in McElhone's beautiful eyes. The two lovers fight the idea of their love's unreality until they can no longer try, and the resolution, this time deliberate in an utterly gripping way, takes them to a place where the silences are blissful and the tableaux warm and the dissonances can finally, just slightly, resolve. And if you learn to breathe in Soderbergh's rhythms — as stated earlier, not an easy task — and sustain that ache we all feel when we see beauty pass, you will no doubt be ravished by the story he tells in his "Solaris."

But there is, as you may have guessed, another story to be told here. It slips in at the margins in this movie just enough to make you miss it. It's the old, old story of human hubris, in thinking that we could stand anything but mute and uncomprehending if an alien intelligence tried to communicate with us. In Lem's novel, there is no doubt as to the unreality of the visitors; Kris's devotion to his visitor is seen as an accidentally induced sickness. The question lies below the station: what is doing this? And what is it doing? Soderbergh addresses this question slightly with Gordon's repeated insistence that "I want the humans to win," but her intended victory is turning tail and flying back to Earth. Lem knows that's a loss; the discovery in his novel is that we'll never, ever win.

Perhaps stories of the limits of humanity are normally less interesting than stories of the unlimited possibilities of love, but the former was quite interesting in Lem's Solaris. And really, aren't you interested in the question of what being would conjure up ghosts of the past to see how we react? I mean, besides a director.

BASICALLY EXTRANEOUS THINGS I NOTICED IN THIS MOVIE

• Snow listens to Insane Clown Posse (this was actually identified for me by a man known only to me as Vince) and Bach's Goldberg Variations when he talks to Kris.
• Kris lives in Chicago. (You can tell because the subway passes the sign for the Merchandise Mart Loop station.)

A LINE I USED WHEN TALKING ABOUT THIS MOVIE THAT I AM DISAPPOINTED I CANNOT FIND SPACE FOR IN THIS REVIEW

"It's not often that I say this, but I was actually wishing for less ambiguity." True enough.

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