The first time I saw Solaris, I was turned off by it. Maybe it wasn't the right time or I wasn't in the right mood, but it just felt cold, distant, like it couldn't connect, and that Clooney's performance was stoic but that he didn't do much except pose with wide eyes at his dead wife re-incarnated on a space ship. But life changes, times change, and my appreciation of film has grown in eight years (and also emotionally maturing from late teens to twenties does some difference as well). The film works now like a poem for loss and love, as opposed to a stilted science fiction story. It also rings with resonance since it feels like Soderbergh, as director/writer/DP/editor, has gone through similar or just exact emotions as characters in this film, or at least his surrogate in Clooney. He's gone through love and loss, and time, much like his main character (and like for many of us with memory), becomes splintered. The backdrop is fantastic, but is just right for what is emphasized in the story.
It's also a gorgeously shot film, I should add. While it probably might not trump its predecessor of the material, Tarkovsky's 1972 film, it comes close, closer than would be expected. Again, what seemed like a cold style seeing it years ago changes with coming to it with a better appreciation of the technique that's employed here. It's significant that primarily the scenes inside the spaceship are all locked-down, only pans and tilting with the camera, and the scenes back on Earth- the memories of Clooney and McElhone's characters on Earth when they were married- are hand-held in camera, frenetic, more emotionally harrowing in the realistic breakdown of a marriage over time. Soderbergh's emphasis is direct, and he wants us to feel it as well, especially when the characters' minds break off into those memories, and as a time-line becomes one.
The acting is also a great measure of Soderbergh's trust in the material. It's deeply emotional work, usually in the way that character do or try to hold back what is really going on, but when it comes over a character it's harrowing. I loved the moment when, for example, the 2nd version of Rheya is resurrected after she tries to kill herself with liquid oxygen on the ship. This should be nothing new to aficionados of science fiction (and indeed it was also a key scene in the original Tarkovsky film, done equally with passion and terror), but its handled solemnly, like this itself is sort of a tragedy, knowing how real-but-fake this Rheya is, especially when she becomes aware when waking up (watch her eyes in that moment, it's really extraordinary). Other supporting work from Jeremy Davies as a slightly crazy but intellectual comic-relief comes in (maybe the side of Soderbergh that's intelligent but erratic?), and Viola Davis as the real captain of the ship, trying to stick to reason.
It's further impressive to see how Soderbergh, via James Cameron's fx company, utilizes the shots of space. There is wonder and awe, and certainly the music (co-opting off of 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly the Jupiter Landing) works with them like attachments. But it's not used to overcome the viewer, just as a means of 'this is where they are'. What matters here are the characters; even if it is gorgeous and spectacular to look outside at the sights of space, what will happen to these people first? Soderbergh's film, one of his better ones really, focuses on the scope of human experience set in light and dark, reality and nightmare, like a poem suffused in what is haunting and bizarre. I hope to revisit it every so often. 9.5/10
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