Solaris; Altman's Images
Because he's not one of the 70s film brats, Steven Soderbergh's remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's mystical sci-fi drama Solaris turns it into a love-gone-bad lament. As if mining for bubblegum, he brings out the sap of Solaris' spiritual meditation. Not since City of Angels, the Meg Ryan remake of Wings of Desire, have romance scenes (couples walking, smiling, tumbling) been so fatuous.
George Clooney plays psychologist Chris Kelvin sent on a mission to analyze the strange behavior of space station scientists orbiting the planet Solaris. As Kelvin shares the crew's hysteria, he's forced to reconsider the love and guilt in his past marriage to Rheya (acted by Natascha McElhone). That's what contemporary middlebrow "sophistication" comes down to: a portentous date-movie.
When Steven Spielberg repeated Tarkovsky's climactic tableau at the end of Minority Report, few people made the visual-thematic connection to issues of love, memory and death, preferring to think Spielberg unserious. Truth is, movie brats Spielberg and De Palma (whose gravity-defying love-death sequences in Mission to Mars shame Soderbergh) are more penetrating filmmakers. Soderbergh, despite his interesting ambition, rarely gets beyond tasteful slickness-no matter how many reviewers mistake that for intellectuality. (Something was wrong-yet-right about Mike Nichols, the original plastic intellect, presenting Soderbergh's New York Film Critics award for Traffic.)
It's been hard to pin down what film culture lost when the movie-brat era gave way to indie rule, but this new Solaris makes it plain: Most indies have no vision, no faith. Reacting against the previous generation's movie-mania, indies concentrated on specious social reality (often just middle-class subjectivity). Now an entire generation of filmgoers has forgotten how vision-the sensitivity to film (once a global passion)-is, at heart, an expression of life. (Scorsese memorably congratulated the National Board of Review on "caring about old movies, because to care about old movies is to care about people.") Directors like Spielberg, De Palma, Scorsese, Walter Hill practiced humanism and social awareness by referencing movie culture. They did it (like the French New Wave) through genre revision and great visual aptitude. Spielberg's Minority Report was of a piece with Tarkovsky's numinous nature and metaphysical studies. So were Hill's Supernova (especially before Coppola recut it and Hill took his name off it) and De Palma's Mission to Mars.
In Solaris' presskit Soderberg says, "I'm not interested in making a film about what technology is going to be like a few decades from now." (Strange coming from the director of the techno-madhouse Full Frontal.) This betrays his indie-era bias against movie-brat fondness for genres like sci-fi. Soderbergh forgets what Spielberg, De Palma and Hill knew: that technology is not simply that in Solaris. Tarkovsky speculated on science as a test of faith and moral behavior-an insight the movie-brats understood because they did not condescend to the genre. Cooling out gee-whiz gadgetry as juvenile nonsense, Soderbergh features his own brand of nonsense instead. When Kelvin's late wife appears onboard the spaceship Prometheus, it's arguably either a life-or-death hallucination or a maudlin Hollywood fantasy. Tarkovsky made Kelvin's marital past Bergman-deep; this is Lelouch-lite. A scientist says of the planet Solaris, "It seems to be reacting almost as if it knows it's being observed," and Soderbergh cuts to McElhone flirting her way through a dinner party-a heavenly body reduced to literalism.
Despite signs of originality and daring in Kafka, Schizopolis, Out of Sight and parts of The Limey, Soderbergh has lately specialized in wan remakes such as The Underneath, Traffic, Erin Brockovich (essentially a Clintonesque remake of Norma Rae) and the appalling Ocean's Eleven. This mediocrity has been hard-won (it probably involved Soderbergh recalling his indie status by refusing to do a sword-and-sandal epic). Soderbergh covers his lack of imagination with solemn pretense. He thinks he's making something other than a sci-fi movie.
But Tarkovsky could be intellectually profound because he was visually profound. No filmmaker showed less concern with the mechanisms of genre than Tarkovsky; mystifying man's existence, not suspense, was his drive. While I appreciate Soderbergh's narrative economy for reducing Tarkovsky's enervating pace, I can't help admiring Tarkovsky's vision-its look and its exploration. In Solaris Tarkovsky used film clips as spiritual memory (understanding this helps appreciate De Palma's film references and miraculous coincidences in Femme Fatale). Yet Soderbergh, disengaged from genre, doesn't dare astonish the audience's cultural memory-and that's what depresses contemporary film culture. Movies that display vision (whether All or Nothing or Femme Fatale) play to audiences and critics who have forgotten how to savor the distinctive way a director lights a face or moves a camera through an interior so that it enhances one's own personal experience of faces and spaces. Although it may seem Soderbergh is doing exactly that in this austere remake, his Solaris lacks revelatory vision. The mundane spaceship evokes the 80s drabness of Capricorn One and Saturn 3. It doesn't make you rethink anything about movies or life. Uninspired by either Solaris' themes or visual possibilities, Soderbergh proves that genre itself, the narrative form movie brats used to codify their private or social issues-to make a film connect with history and experience-is in disrepute.
Achieving a visually impressive remake can be as simple as the way Halle Berry rises from the sea in Die Another Day, a sexual fantasy that's fully the equal of Ursula Andress rising from the sea in Dr. No 40 years ago. Soderbergh's no-thrills Solaris confirms today's alarming lack of visual sophistication and sensual capacity; it's an extension of the sniffy critical responses to some of the best recent films. A.I., Minority Report, Mission to Mars, Femme Fatale and Supernova already got where Soderbergh (and his dumbing-down producer James Cameron) pretend to go in Solaris. Spielberg, De Palma and Hill made sci-fi stories about the certainty of death that, through visual profundity, suggested we should be equally certain of life and spirit. Those films were all done in Tarkovsky's spirit ("To preserve basic Truths, we need the mysteries of happiness, love and death"-a virtual defense of genre). But they also maintained the humor and excitement of American genre art. Probably the combination of wit and vision throws some people off, so Soderbergh cannily jettisons humor, the better for his blandness to go unridiculed.
To be kind, it's hard to think of a sci-fi hero exuding more grounded masculinity than Clooney (unless it's the actors in Hill's Supernova). He's good at reticent ardor, but McElhone, model-tall and bug-eyed like an alien, telegraphs too much. She could be falling in and out of love like the clones in perfume commercials. That's the true level of Soderbergh's remake.
Images came between the duo's work on McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, and all three are visual landmarks. Zsigmond's use of 70s film stock and the wide screen have been well restored so you can appreciate color photography that is both subtle and vivid. One virtuoso sequence shows the dark house where Susannah York and her husband vacation filling with fireplace smoke, then latticed by Venetian blinds until the windows are thrown open, taking in the outdoor brilliance. Images was shot in Ireland and the landscapes seem unearthly, spectral. The miracle of Altman-Zsigmond's vision is to make that real world seem to emanate from York's imagination. (There's an unforgettable vista of sheep and Shetland ponies gamboling across a glade while a silvery waterfall in back steadies the composition.)
Wags dismissed the film as Altman's Repulsion. Today Images looks like one of Altman's special explorations of the female psyche, warming up for 3 Women. No more restricted by genre convention than Femme Fatale, Images shows a woman's consciousness stirred, lost in passion-as the Altman-Zsigmond team was enraptured by cinema.