Solaris

When I saw Solaris over the weekend, I couldn’t stop thinking about a comment made by Steve Buscemi in his directory’s commentary for the Sopranos episode “Pine Barrens”, which I had seen earlier in the week. Buscemi was talking about how much he admired his director of photography on the episode, and how he thinks that the best camera work does not call attention to itself, that the viewer becomes so lost in the story that the last thing on their mind are the technical decisions and cleverness of the photographer and editors. I think that based on Solaris, as well as pretty much everything else I’ve ever seen by Steven Soderbergh aside from Erin Brockovitch, it’s probably safe to say that Soderbergh does not share this opinion.

Virtually every scene in Solaris begs the viewer to acknowledge how beautiful, clever, or well-shot the images are, to the point that the plot seemed besides the point. I know that I had almost no investment in the story, and I’m not sure if it’s really the fault of the story itself since I’ve never seen the original film or read the source novel. At my most cynical, I wonder if Soderbergh chose to make Solaris not so much because he cared about the story, but that to film the story it would require a number of directorial challenges and that the general philosophical tone would allow audiences to forgive several gratuitous and selfconciously ‘arty’ photographic decisions. The film looks and feels as though Soderbergh is checking off a to-do list of film geek and photo techy things that he wanted to fit into a movie, as if he’s thinking “2001 homage – check. Several scenes in which we linger the camera in tight close-up on one actor for the duration of a conversation – check. Another 2001 homage – check…” In many ways, Solaris felt more like a math problem being solved on screen than a genuine moving story, much less one that is meant to be somewhat romantic and intellectually stimulating.

It’s not George Clooney’s fault, though. The guy gives a fairly decent performance, given what he has to work with. He’s a likeable screen presence, and he doesn’t overact, much unlike his tremendously irritating leading lady, Natascha McElhone. McElhone grates on me in many ways which are obvious (poor acting and line reading, a mysteriously fluctuating accent, a tendency to flail about a bit too much) but also in ways that I’m not sure I can verbalize. Something about her is just so wrong, I can’t help but be repelled by her. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie in which an actress bothered me as much as she does – if I were rating this film on a star system, I think that I would take off a star simply for the fact that she was cast in it. She’s just that awful.

It’s probably best for people to avoid Soderbergh’s Solaris unless they have a genuine interest in Soderbergh as a filmmaker, or have already seen and/or read the previous incarnations of the story. It’s not without redeeming qualities — the story may not have done much for me, but it’s not awful; and as gratuitous as many of Soderbergh’s shots may be, they are still quite beautiful and much of it would work well as still photography. Regardless of that, the faults of this film are too distracting and ultimately make this film a passable curiosity.