Solaris

If you’ve seen one of the commercials for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, you’ll notice that it’s being pushed as a date movie; a romance. It’s a bit of a risky strategy for 20th Century Fox, because, while it is a movie about love, it may tell some happy couples a lot more than they really want to know. Solaris is both science-fiction and love story: It’s about strange places in outer space, but mostly it’s about the strange space that love occupies in human lives.

A downsizing of the mammoth 1972 Russian film classic, Solaris features a narrative that would look at home on an episode of Star Trek: a troubled psychiatrist whose wife committed suicide years before is sent to investigate the strange goings-on on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. When he arrives he finds the crew either dead, or apparently crazy. When he awakes after his first night’s sleep there, he discovers the source of the troubles: the planet itself appears to have the power to conjure up the object of your dreams and obsessions, or at least a seemingly perfect copy of it. And since he’s been obsessed with his dead wife, guess who he wakes up beside?

What follows is light on narrative and heavy on implication. The main issue we are forced to come to grips with is, how much of our love for another is based on the reality that is that person, and how much is based on our imagination of what that other person is? And if the greater part of that person who we love is really our own artifice, what does that mean for that other person? Solaris pushes that issue by giving us a conscious, self-identified woman who has been created entirely from the memories of her husband, a person who has to construct herself as she goes along out of fragments of unfamiliar memories. Her struggle is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s as profound a character as Hollywood has given us in decades.

Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, Solaris feels a bit like what 2001 A Space Odyssey might have felt like if Brian Eno had been in charge of the music. It doesn’t give us everything; we have to fill in a good deal of the picture ourselves, which is just one of the complements Soderbergh pays his audience. But like our psychiatrist orbiting that planet, what we emerge from the theater with will depend a lot on what we bring in ourselves.

If Solaris is going to be tricky sell to some audiences, it’s still a triumph for its creator. What Ron Howard is to studio executives, Steven Soderbergh is to us: he’s the closest thing we’ve got to lead-pipe reliable. Soderbergh is America’s most consistently interesting working director: In 13 years he’s produced 10 first-rate movies, which is a feat most directors won’t achieve in a lifetime. (And he doesn’t turn 40 for another year.) If he keeps it up, there’s no way he’s not one of the greatest filmmakers in history. D’you always wish you’d been there when Howard Hawks was at his peak in the 1930’s and 40’s? Well, we’re there right now.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, 2002