Soderbergh Marathon: Part 15

Intro

Solaris (2002)
I'm going to compare this movie to a general style made by another, acclaimed director.  For most critics, nearly all of them in fact, this comparison would be complimentary and in fact maybe some of the highest praise you can give to a director.  I am not most critics.

So here is a potential character flaw for me or if you want to be more generous, a blind spot in my movie watching.  I have watched 2.5 Terrance Malick movies and I haven't liked any of them.  They are boring, they are pretentious, and they are mind-numbingly long.  The 0.5 is The Tree of Life, which I don't even think I watched half of that.  I'm not somebody who likes to watch nature for 20 minutes when I'm watching a movie.

So obviously, this is the Soderbergh version of a Terrance Malick movie.  If nothing else, I appreciate that the length of a Malick movie is not the obstacle I think it is - it's just that I don't like his style.  Because Soderbergh understands that ideally movies are less than two hours, his movies get to the point.  And Solaris is a Terrance Malick film if Terrance Malick believed movies could be short.

But like I said, I don't particularly like Terrance Malick movies and I had been blaming the length on that (and it was definitely my problem with A Hidden Life, a movie I may have liked if it was two hours), but it turns out I'm just as capable of disliking a Malick movie that is short.

I guess my problem is that I just don't like movies that are "reflective" and seem to be in a dream-like state?  I mean I don't mind when movies have those two elements, but when that's the whole movie, I personally have nothing to latch onto.  I have not been given a reason to care about the characters, and so I don't care.

The cast is top notch as these type of movies always seem to be.  It requires a strong cast, because there's not a whole lot in the script.  So the actors are forced to do much of the heavy lifting of providing characterization.  There are essentially just five characters in this movie, and one of them is only seen through recordings.

The movie is purposefully distant and designed for you to be disoriented so you're trying to figure out what's going on for a decent portion of the movie.  Which is fine, but between that and the dream-like state, there's very few moments to sketch out the characters, half of which are designed to be hard to read.  Viola Davis is relatively early in her career in this movie and had you seen it in 2002, you could probably predict her rise pretty easily.  She's that good.  Jeremy Davies is at his most Jeremy Davies here.

And the two leads, George Clooney and the distant Natascha McElhone provide the emotional center of the movie.  It's based on a Stanislaw Lem novel and in fact had been made into a movie already.  Solaris as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky was a 167 minute movie.  With how Roger Ebert describes the original movie, that sounds like an actual Terrance Malick film, so I have little doubt I would not like it, since it's also the length of a Terrance Malick film.

So, sorry that I ended up just talking about Malick this whole time, but well it felt like he could have directed this, which if you like his movies, take that as a compliment, but he's personally not for me, so this movie was not for me.

2/4 stars