November 27, 2002

UNPREDICTABILITY IS GETTING to be a liability for Steven Soderbergh, about whom the question no longer seems to be, What will he do next? but, What won't he do? Is there any game plan here? Are idiosyncratic choices enough to maintain that "indie sensibility does Hollywood" cachet, or do we still expect talented directors to choose films that are actually right for them?

Soderbergh is a strange case. Well, maybe not so strange; it's hardly unusual for a director's work to become less compelling as it grows more commercially viable. But he's acquired prestige well beyond the original festival/art house circuit too, while attracting big marquee stars to projects they can pat themselves on the back for participating in – just as they used to over "doing a Woody" (an era presumably well over, given that Allen's last movie starred such luminaries as Téa Leoni, Treat Williams, and George Hamilton). Erin Brockovich was a movie of the week that made Julia Roberts look more like an actress for playing down-caste. Traffic was overvalued as a searing indictment of the drug trade, when all it did was reset a BBC series in North America. The Limey and Full Frontal were footnote movies, clever but slight. Ocean's Eleven made potloads of cash, yet no one appeared to be having a good time, least of all the director. For all their vaunted quirks, none of Soderbergh's "crossover" films – except his excellent first attempt, Out of Sight – has fulfilled the promise inherent in Sex, Lies and Videotape, King of the Hill (still Soderbergh's best and certainly most compassionate project), or even Schizopolis.

Of course, Soderbergh will never be Michael Bay or Ron Howard – he's neither a genuine hack nor a generic quality-controller. But if we can no longer tell why he's interested in making a particular movie, how interesting can it be? Providing one abysmal answer to that question is Solaris, a project that looked perversely fascinating on paper only to emerge so, so, so unfascinating onscreen.

The 1972 Russian Solyaris is nearly three hours of Soviet humorlessness and philosophical luggage, orbiting very slowly in the Mosfilm Studio universe. You could hardly miss that Andrei Tarkovsky's outer space was really inner space. But in much the same way that late filmmaker's impressive visuals seem too self-consciously masterful, his metaphysics congratulate themselves simply for being there. Clear away the hocus-pocus, and Solyaris is just one of the most pompous movies ever made about a failed marriage – no more, no less.

So is Soderbergh's version, which does mercifully slog along for only 98 minutes as opposed to 165. An old friend's urgent message gets psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) picked to rescue a space station that's mysteriously cut off all communication with earthly headquarters. Upon arrival he discovers his commander friend and another crewmember dead, a pair of scientists played by Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies in various states of paranoid unravel, and no immediate explanation. He's promised he'll soon understand.

So he does – the first onboard sleep summons memories of his suicided wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone). As he wakes, she turns up at his side, seemingly in the flesh. Whether back from the dead, "copied" by the enigmatic neighboring galactic body Solaris itself, or simply hallucinated, she's just as baffled about this turn of events as Chris is.

"If you keep thinking there's a solution, you'll die here. There are no answers, only choices," one character intones. Fair enough, if a bit New Agey. But as Chris and Rheya realize they're predestined to repeat past actions rather than improve upon them, Solaris becomes a trap – for the audience as well. Where does all this soul-searching, sotto voce dialogue, wrinkle-in-time schemata, and spectral atmosphere get us? To affirmation of that (groan) ultimate "truth," love? To sheer tap-dripping boredom?

All that and even less. Solaris will exasperate the ticket-buying many and no doubt get defended by critical contrarians. It's a stab at a cerebral movie about basic emotions, by a writer-director who is smart but not meditative, observant but seldom deeply moved. At least Tarkovsky was working in an idiom where he felt most at home. Soderbergh, cutting himself adrift from all the elements that normally spark his interest, has created pretentious space junk, elaborate but conviction-free. Working again as his own editor and photographer, he gives the film an ambient, sterile, off-kilter atmosphere that is distinct if not engaging, much aided by the design team and Cliff Martinez's spectral score. The planet Solaris pulses in a liquid purple-blue haze that recurs like a motif, but there's no real poetry of stillness or groping toward profundity. There's only the terrible realization that you've seen this before – as with every Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk was beguiled and frustrated by another galactic sphere's unreachable meta-female.

Tweakster-cast for the 90th time, Davies acts so much with his hands you want to bind them like those of a thumb-sucking 10-year-old. McEhlone has been almost great in several films, but Rheya is just the upmarket man's feminine ideal. Nor is there much chemistry with Clooney, who's always best matched up with himself anyway. (No surprise when his body is the one draped across the screen foreground in a nude sequence, obscuring hers.) Expressing terror, longing, and vulnerability, qualities almost wholly alien to any prior Clooney role, the actor works hard. Still, there's nothing in Solaris to grasp onto – like the planet's gassy psychedelia, emotions here look pretty without attaching to any terra firma.