George Clooney (34 page)

The film opens with a close-up of rain running down a window, viewed from the inside. There is no music, no voice-over—few clues that this is indeed a science fiction narrative at all. Our first view of psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sitting on a bed, hunched forward, dressed in a gray undershirt and boxer shorts. His expression is blank, and along with the pathetic fallacy of the rain, the mood is somber. A ghostly female voice-over asks him directly what is wrong and whether he loves her anymore. The scene establishes the tone of the rest of the film: sedate pacing, a hero who appears thoughtful, and a refusal to offer audiences easily won spectacle. Equally importantly, it establishes the notion of a presence that is not physically possible, i.e., that life is an existential experience. Milena Canonero's costume adds unobtrusive touches of futuristic style to his dress, so that he wears only different shades of black (on earth, a long Matrix-style leather coat; on Solaris, a slightly lighter shade of astronaut-like uniform), underlining his status as a figure in mourning.

A loud cacophony of undetermined sound, including a plane landing, takes us to the next scene, Kelvin striding through a crowd in a rain-soaked
street. The extreme low angle allows Soderbergh to avoid providing too much detail of a futuristic society (like the later tight shots in the shopping scene) as well as evokes that seminal view of a bleak future urban society, where it seems to rain all the time and where nonliving creatures start to become aware of their own status, as in Ridley Scott's 1982
Blade Runner
. Rheya (Natascha McElhone) also mentions later that in Kelvin's apartment, there are absolutely no pictures (a key part of the means of implanting memories in Scott's film). There are echoes too of another Scott film,
Alien
(1979), in references to a faceless “company” and more so perhaps
Aliens
(1986), directed by James Cameron (one of the producers of
Solaris
), in the disappearance of a military unit sent to investigate a mysterious signal from a spacecraft and a single individual who is asked for help partly because they have unique skills for this situation but also partly as therapy for themselves.

The strongest link with either of Scott's films is in the visual stylization, which reflects the emotional stasis of Kelvin at this point. It is a future that is cold and hard. The sound of Kelvin preparing his food echoes harshly around his flat, and the
Alien
-style tracking shots through the corridors of the Prometheus (the ship orbiting Solaris) are accompanied by an almost constant low hum of machinery. There are also evocations of
2001
(Stanley Kubrick, 1968) in the slow pacing, the elaborate docking sequence, lengthy shots of the Prometheus turning through space, and the philosophical consequences of interacting with nonhuman species. The colorful control panel lights reflected on Kelvin's visor as he looks out at Prometheus for the first time clearly evoke the “Stargate” sequence.

It is not until some way into the film that we actually see Kelvin address another character face-to-face. We see him on the phone leaving a message, then another phone conversation, but he is facing away from us and we hear only his minimal phrasing (nothing from his addressee). He speaks via an entry-phone screen to security personnel bringing the tape from Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) asking for help, and pilots the ship alone, not even speaking to an on-board computer. Kelvin's first close-up, looking up at the video screen, shows his face drawn and eyes welling up slightly, as if on the verge of tears. On earth, he seems to lead a half-life, floating among ghosts, possibly driven by his grief or perhaps this is the default setting of human existence. At a bereavement self-help group, he might equally be the therapist or one of the clients. The status of his later flashbacks is suspect as they are subjective, appear in dreams, and apparently under the catalytic influence of Solaris. Cold blue-gray hues dominate the scenes on the Prometheus, contrasting with a warmer brown-orange color palette for the past back on earth, but such a rigid juxtaposition is blurred by sound bleeding across cuts, like Rheya's
dialogue on voice-over and the steady hum of the spacecraft. Cliff Martinez's score uses an oriental instrumentation to suggest a sense of wonder, such as when we see Prometheus for the first time, and subsequently to signal a haunting sense of unease, heard at moments where Solaris seems to be exerting its greatest influence.

Once on Prometheus, the narrative appears to shift toward murder mystery, with Kelvin following unexplained trails of blood, and Soderbergh uses slightly shaky camera movement from Kelvin's point of view to emphasize the notion of a personalized subjective narrative. However, such movement, except for the brief chase of an unknown boy, soon gives way to characters sitting and talking. The swift shot of an unexplained blood print on the ceiling or the appearance of the boy do not motivate extended deductive reasoning because there is no explanation. The boy is supposedly Gibarian's child but might equally reflect Kelvin's own desire for a child, which was a key fault line in his relationship with Rheya.

Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the Fantastic, originally conceived in relation to Russian folktales, is sometimes applied to film studies, and is useful here as we are faced with something we cannot explain.
¹
However, what Todorov terms a moment of “hesitation” cannot be extended indefinitely and gradually loses its ability to unsettle an audience as it seems that we will be denied a definitive category into which we might place our experience: it is neither scientifically explicable nor a religious vision. As Gibarian says, “There are no answers, only choices,” which makes the vast body of the film into an extended moment of Todorovian hesitation and dramatically weakens its ability to hold the attention of viewers over time. A mystery will hold our attention only if we think it can be solved. Talking about it does not help as language seems redundant. The only solution seems to be submission. On questioning the senior physicist, Gordon (Viola Davis) curtails extended debate on events “until it happens to you,” echoing the notion behind murder mysteries like George Sluizer's
The Vanishing
(1988) that you can understand an unknown phenomenon fully only by submitting yourself to it (also part of the
Alien
franchise).

Sleep seems to be the portal to perceiving creatures, or so-called visitors, that are human in appearance but come from a world beyond our experience, a more philosophical version of the lethal threat posed by Wes Craven's Freddy Krueger. However, at no point does any character articulate what this might mean about humanity, since the visitors are clearly reflections of the desires of the individuals they visit. In Kelvin's first dream, Soderbergh makes the transition from objective reality to a
dreamscape by progressively cutting closer on Kelvin's sleeping head, intercut with shots of Solaris with electrical flashes like the synapses of a giant brain and subjective point-of-view shots from Kelvin. This happens without fictional markers indicating that we are entering a dream, like a wobbly screen, but the subsequent scenes with Rheya on a train make sense only as flashbacks to Kelvin's first glimpse of her. This attempt to show on-screen the thoughts of a character is reminiscent of Laurence Olivier's slow zoom into his own head, while delivering the “To be or not to be monologue” in
Hamlet
(1948). In the flashback, we tilt up from the subjective shot of Rheya holding what looks like a doorknob to a clear shot of her face. Such direct looks down the camera lens are used in several of the exchanges between Rheya and Kelvin, which intensifies the sense of a connection between them, excluding the world around them, although at the same time it complicates the consistency of viewpoint, since we also see through Rheya's eyes here.

The romance of Kelvin and Rheya, conveyed via flashback, is conveyed primarily by extended shots of her at a party from his point of view, including a shot of her walking away, juxtaposed with Gibarian's description of Solaris on the voice-over (“It's almost as if it knows we're observing it”), suggesting Rheya's coquettish nature. The snatches of dialogue we hear via voice-over might come from his flashback, from Rheya present in the room with him now, or the sense of an almost telepathic relationship, from either past or present. Soderbergh appears to enjoy playing with the viewer's sense of temporal disorientation. A conversation between Kelvin and Rheya in a later scene fades to black, a conventional marker for the end of a scene, but then fades into the same scene just a few seconds later like a very slow blink.

Rheya becoming increasingly paranoid that she cannot remember being present at her own memories is strongly reminiscent of Rachael (Sean Young) in
Blade Runner
as she gradually realizes that memory is key to what makes us fully human and that lacking this, she is a humanoid robot, a replicant in the language of the film, and Deckard's cajoling that he is only joking feels very like Kelvin's story here to Rheya that her increasing mental unease is just caused by fatigue. Rheya suggests that their continued existence is possible only if they both engage in a form of shared denial, “an unspoken understanding that I'm not really a human being.” At the end, Kelvin (now apparently a visitor too) does have a picture of Rheya on his fridge, by implication to help his memory as he is “haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong.” Rheya suffers the existential nightmare of appearing to be immortal (her body restores itself after her suicide attempt) but knowing that she is not fully human either.

Solaris
is more convincing as a philosophical provocation than a romantic narrative. The exploration of the concept of a second chance at love is compromised by Rheya's ambiguous status. Viewers cannot invest much emotional weight in the potentially engaging notion of living one's life over again and avoiding previous mistakes if the mechanism of this repetition is only delusional. Kelvin belittles Rheya's belief in “a higher form of consciousness” and lectures her that “we're a mathematical problem and that's that.” Kelvin's memory of finding Rheya's body the first time, the crumpled poem held in her fist in in sharp focus, is intercut with his search for her on Prometheus. He finds her ready to submit herself to Gordon's destructive beam, and as Kelvin looks at her face on a monitor, we hear her voice before her lips start to move in synch, suggesting a blend of a fantasy in his head with what appears before his eyes. However, when she looks at Solaris, we cut to a memory of her buying a pregnancy kit, and later during a dinner table discussion, we see Kelvin from her point of view with the sound cut, representing her wish fulfillment. That is, we are witnessing a supposed projection having flashbacks of her own.

A rare moment of tension in the film appears when we cut back to a close shot of Kelvin asleep, in the same position as before but now touched by a female hand to which he does not instantly respond, but upon waking, he leaps from the bed in fear. He cannot bring himself to look at her, keeping his eyes downcast, fearful that she is a ghost or perhaps more fearful that she is real. He slaps himself hard and grabs a nearby piece of furniture before summoning the courage to look up, at which point the tears in his eyes convey a mixture of loss and fear in equal measure.

The visitors are reflections of how the characters remember them. Rheya had seemed suicidal to Kelvin, so that is how she reappears to him. However, in the intervening years since Tarkovsky's film, the notion that our memories can be manipulated and we are living inside some form of construct has been given cinematic expression in a number of ways, from the Philip K. Dick-inspired
Total Recall
(Paul Verhoeven, 1990) to the computer game reality of
eXistenZ
(David Cronenberg, 1999) to Peter Weir's media-controlled world in
The Truman Show
(1998) to the virtual world of
The Matrix
(the Wachowski brothers, 1999). Furthermore, the more precise concept of an alien entity reflecting back the desires of the humans with which it comes into contact has been expressed before in
Sphere
(Barry Levinson, 1998). The element of spectacle that some viewers might expect from a science fiction film is present only in shots of the ship orbiting around the planet and lengthy shots of Solaris itself. There are no action sequences, no explosions, no fights,
and only a very small cast. Individual shot lengths are extended and often involve a character sitting or looking, i.e., not moving.

The ending, not in Lem's story, of Kelvin somehow living on with Rheya, both translated into visitors (signaled by his finger now miraculously healing from a cut, in contrast to the opening), might have some logic from within the film as we do not know how such visitors exist or whether they can die. However, it feels like a consoling coda, a romantic cliché, contrived to reflect the Dylan Thomas poem that Kelvin quotes on their first meeting (“Death Shall Have No Dominion”) and added to palliate the bleak suggestion that all of our lives are only existential dreams. Perhaps too, this represents a limitation in Clooney's on-screen persona: the idea that a character he plays can crash and die at the close of a narrative is too bleak for most audiences to accept. We have a scene with Kelvin lying on the floor of Prometheus as it falls into the surface of Solaris, and from his point of view, he sees a blurred object approaching, which comes into focus as the small boy from earlier, supposedly Gibarian's son, and who, ET-like, puts out his hand. In close-up, the two hands meet, like a crude version of Michelangelo's fresco “The Creation of Adam,” an image of the child that Kelvin was denied with Rheya.

Back in the kitchen on earth, Kelvin asks if he is alive or dead to which Rheya replies, “We don't have to think like that anymore” and “Everything we've done is forgiven,” introducing an explicitly moral dimension, which has been largely absent up to this point, in a thinly veiled attempt at some Christian consolation in the narrative. Kelvin's sin (driving Rheya away) is followed by repentance, guilt and purgatory (his experiences on the ship), and redemption (his supposed existence on/in response to Solaris). The narrative explores different levels of grief, via all the characters, not only Kelvin. As Kelvin confronts Snow (Jeremy Davis) with the mystery of two dead crewmen and a further one having disappeared, Clooney's expression becomes slightly more wide-eyed and even slightly crazed as he visibly struggles to comprehend what he is experiencing.