Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975)

Peter Kern, Hanna Schygulla, Rüdiger Vogler, Nastassja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech in Wrong Move

Wilhelm: Rüdiger Vogler
Laertes: Hans Christian Blech
Therese Farner: Hanna Schygulla
Mignon: Nastassja Kinski
Bernhard Landau: Peter Kern
The Industrialist: Ivan Desny
Wilhelm's Mother: Marianne Hoppe
Janine: Lisa Kreuzer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Peter Handke
Based on a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Film editor: Peter Przygodda

With his presence in Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road (1976) Rüdiger Vogler became as essential to Wim Wenders's films of the mid-1970s as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese's work in the late 1970s and the 1980s. His homely everyman face is perfect for the self-centered loners of the first and the third films in Wenders's "road trilogy," men who find themselves having to come to terms with a world -- or at least a Germany -- they can't fully accept. But Vogler feels miscast in the middle film -- too old to be playing the young writer out to discover himself, a character drawn by screenwriter Peter Handke from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and thrust into modern post-Nazi, post-Wirtschaftswunder Germany. There is no naïveté left in Vogler's face, there are no illusions to be lost. Yet Wenders sends his 30-year-old Wilhelm on the voyage from northern to southern Germany, from Glückstadt to the Zugspitze, and into encounters with the world of art and politics that might have disillusioned a 20-year-old. Which is not to say that Wrong Move is a failure. It remains a film that tantalizes with its non-realistic narrative, its sense of of a world grown alien to people who think and feel, and of a country haunted by its desperation to escape from a terrible history. No surprise that a good part of its dialogue consists of people telling one another of their dreams, for the film itself has a liminal dreamlike quality. Would a fully awake and aware Wilhelm really pay the train fare for the con artist Laertes and his mute traveling companion Mignon? Do people really fall in love when their eyes meet between trains traveling on different tracks, and then somehow manage to get together after all? Do strangers really decide to travel together and wind up by mistake in the mansion of a suicidal industrialist? Or does all of that happen only in dreams? Wenders's film is touched by the mysterious angst that afflicts the characters in Antonioni's films -- the scene in the concrete caverns of Frankfurt evokes the bleak modern Rome of a film like L'Eclisse (1962), for example. In the context of a film so beautifully shot, so eccentrically put together as Wrong Move, even the miscasting of Vogler feels like not so much a mistake as a provocation.

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Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in Youth

Fred Ballinger: Michael Caine
Mick Boyle: Harvey Keitel
Lena Ballinger: Rachel Weisz
Jimmy Tree: Paul Dano
Brenda Morel: Jane Fonda
Queen's Emissary: Alex McQueen
Julian: Ed Stoppard
Paloma Faith: Herself
Miss Universe: Madalina Diana Ghenea
Masseuse: Luna Zimic Mijovic
Sumi Jo: Herself

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Music: David Lang

Woody Allen

Is it just accidental that in Youth, wearing a slouchy hat and dark-rimmed glasses, Michael Caine often looks like Woody Allen? Or is Paolo Sorrentino suggesting some kind of connection between Caine's character, a reclusive composer-conductor trying to drift into retirement, and the prolific but scandal-plagued writer-director? The resemblance might have been more on point if Caine had played Harvey Keitel's part, a writer-director trying to put together what turns out to be his last film, meanwhile obsessing on the lost past and approaching death. But then nothing quite fits together right in Youth, a somewhat scattered and occasionally enervated film. Caine's Fred Ballinger and Keitel's Mick Boyle are old friends -- there is even a suggestion, not followed up, that they may once have been lovers. They are also tied by the fact that Fred's daughter, Lena, is married to Mick's son, Julian. Fred and Mick have come together at a spa in Switzerland, Fred to undergo medical examinations, Mick to work with an entourage of screenwriters to put together the final touches on a script that's meant to star one of his longtime collaborators, the actress Brenda Morel. Also on hand, as a kind of confidant for both Fred and Mick, is a young actor, Jimmy Tree, preparing for a film in which he would play Adolf Hitler, an attempt to counter his popular image as the star of a sci-fi movie in which he played a robot. Sorrentino tries hard to bring together all the threads of each character's plot, including the breakup of Lena and Julian's marriage, Fred's resistance to a command performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and Mick's difficulties in coming up with a final scene for his film. But the pacing of Youth is too slow, and the manipulation of the themes of youth and age, past and present, too superficial. Caine and Keitel are two of the most dynamic actors ever, and Rachel Weisz and Paul Dano are certainly worthy of their company, but Sorrentino tamps down their energies. The only time Youth ever comes to life is when Jane Fonda finally makes her appearance as the aging, rather blowsy Brenda, in a performance that reminds us how good she has always been. She delivers the worst news Mick could imagine: that she has decided not to appear in his film but to do a TV series. But Sorrentino follows up her scene with one that feels ripped off from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), in which Mick, like Fellini's Guido long blocked from completing his film, finds himself surrounded in an Alpine meadow by the women from his earlier movies. It's not so much shamelessly derivative as it is pointless. Sorrentino is a formidably imaginative writer-director, as demonstrated by his dazzlingly off-beat TV series The Young Pope and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) -- also indebted to Fellini but with a more inventive twist. Youth has touches of inspiration, but too often gets snarled in its own plots.

Cinemax     

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Elliott Gould and Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye

Philip Marlowe: Elliott Gould
Eileen Wade: Nina van Pallandt
Roger Wade: Sterling Hayden
Marty Augustine: Mark Rydell
Dr. Verringer: Henry Gibson
Harry: David Arkin
Terry Lennox: Jim Bouton
Jo Ann Eggenweiler: Jo Ann Brody

Director: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams

The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's loopy take on the myth of the hardboiled private eye, holds up well today, thanks to Elliott Gould's performance as Philip Marlowe. A long way from the world-weary, cynical Marlowes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, Gould's version of the character is a guy who will go out in the middle of the night to buy food for his cat and will stop dead in the middle of the street for a dog that refuses to get out of the way of his car. Not that he's a softy, exactly. He's not above meting out his own brand of punishment -- a bullet to the gut -- for someone who's eluded the law. It's just that he sees the world as a messed-up place and feels sympathy for its innocents: mainly, cats and dogs. Otherwise, there are few innocents in the circles Marlowe finds himself caught up in. He smokes incessantly, even though no one else around him does, thinking nothing of lighting up -- often from the butt of a previous cigarette -- before he enters someone else's space. He smokes so much that it's surprising he has the wind to chase Eileen Wade's car on foot for several blocks. The plot, as so often in adaptations of Raymond Chandler, doesn't matter so much as the attitudes on display, Marlowe's as well as the various people who are trying to prevent him from uncovering their secrets. Altman indulges himself in his usual overlapping, improvised dialogue, especially in group scenes like the one at the L.A. police station or the ones at which Marlowe is surrounded by gangster Marty Augustine and his henchmen. (One of whom is played by the unbilled and mute but indomitably there Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There are some great set pieces, such as the horrifying scene in which Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle in his girlfriend's face, or the attempt of Marlowe and Eileen to rescue Roger from the crashing surf -- with the nice touch that the Wades' Weimaraner fetches Roger's cane from the waves. There's some entertaining filigree around the narrative edges, like the gaggle of nubile starlets who live next door to Marlowe. And there's some offbeat casting that, for once, works: Nina van Pallandt, whose chief claim to fame is that she was hoaxer Clifford Irving's mistress and ratted on him about his fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and Jim Bouton, the ballplayer whose behind-the-scenes book Ball Four tattled on the misbehavior of idols like Mickey Mantle. Leigh Brackett, who collaborated on the screenplay for Bogart's The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), is the credited screenwriter, and apparently did shape the plot for Altman, but the dialogue has that off-the-cuff, on-the-set character of most of the director's films. John Williams's title theme, sometimes with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, is wittily deployed throughout the movie, as doorbell chimes or supermarket Muzak, and in various arrangements, including one for the municipal band of the Mexican town of Tepotzlan.

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Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Tsuyoshi Kinoshita and Tetsuo Abe in Boy

Toshio Omura: Tetsuo Abe
Takeo Omura: Fumio Watanabe
Takeko Taniguchi: Akiko Koyama
Peewee: Tsuyoshi Kinoshita

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura
Cinematography: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

We meet the 10-year-old title character of Nagisa Oshima's Boy when he's playing hide-and-seek with imaginary friends -- the only kind he'll make in the course of the film -- around a war memorial. We don't even learn his name, Toshio, until the end of the film: His family simply refers to him as "the boy." They are on the down and out in increasingly prosperous Japan: The father, Takeo, is a disabled veteran who has married for a second time and fathered a child, known as "Peewee," with Toshio's stepmother, Takeko. They have cut off ties with their extended family, and when Toshio mentions his grandparents he's told they don't want to see them. They make a living by fraud: Takeko runs into the street to fake being hit by cars, and Takeo bullies the motorists into paying him off instead of calling the police. At a certain point, the parents realize that drivers would be even more willing to pay up if they think they've hit a child, and Toshio agrees to become the pretend victim. They travel around Japan to avoid detection -- too many incidents in one location would cause the police to get wise -- and Oshima's film takes us on this unsentimental journey, going as far as the northernmost point of the country in Hokkaido. The parents squabble constantly, especially when Takeko gets pregnant and decides not to have an abortion, all of which begins to take its toll on Toshio. He runs away several times, always to return: His stepmother gives him cash, to his father's annoyance, so once he tries to buy a ticket to where his grandparents live, but finding himself short of cash he goes only partway, then play-acts a meeting with them before returning to his family. Oshima directs this story, drawn from an actual case of an accident-faking family, with as much detachment as he can muster, but the pathos is inherent to the story, especially since the point of view is that of Toshio. A young non-professional, recruited for the film from an orphanage, Tetsuo Abe gives a remarkable performance, maintaining a precocious stoicism through the worst experiences, but also revealing that there is still a child behind that persona.

Turner Classic Movies

Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Peter Chatel in Fox and His Friends

Franz Biberkopf: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Eugen Thiess: Peter Chatel
Max: Karlheinz Böhm
Philip: Harry Baer
Hedwig: Christiane Maybach
Wolf Thiess: Adrian Hoven
Eugen's Mother: Ulla Jacobsson

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Hohoff
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Kurt Raab
Music: Peer Raben

I have a feeling that Fox and His Friends seems much less exotic or sensational to viewers today than it did in the mid-1970s, given the steady movement of depictions of gay men into mainstream entertainment culture. At the time it created outrage, not just from defenders of the heterosexual norm but also from the gay community, which found much of it distorted and unflattering. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story is not about being gay, it's about being exploited, about mistaking predation for love. Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf, known as "Fox" from his gig as "Fox the Talking Head" in a sleazy carnival act, is a classic naïf who is taken for all he's worth -- which is the 500,000 Deutschmarks (a bit under $125,000 in the day) he won in the lottery. Fassbinder the director doesn't make it clear that the well-dressed guys Franz meets after one of them, Max, picks him up outside a public lavatory, are intentionally trying to fleece him, until Eugen, whose father's printing business is in financial trouble, sees a way to persuade Franz to rescue the company with a sizable investment and promises of part ownership of the firm. It could be, of course, that Eugen just gets a kick out of sleeping with the working class Franz. But he throws over his current lover, Philip, and takes the rough-hewn, slightly homely Franz into his home and bed. Is Eugen telling the truth when he tells Franz that he's being kicked out of his apartment for being gay? It would be entirely plausible in the day and time. Or is it a lie that gives Eugen an opportunity to persuade Franz to buy a posh new apartment, and to furnish it with opulent antiques from Max's shop. And to go along with Franz's new image as a haute bourgeois businessman, he of course needs new clothes from Philip's fashionable shop. None of this exploitation feels premeditated except in hindsight, as Franz becomes Eliza Doolittle to Eugen's Henry Higgins -- though with less overt success. The resulting film is a superb tragicomedy, one of Fassbinder's best films, I think. Fassbinder turns out to be as good an actor as he is a writer and director, giving Franz just the right blend of naïveté and street smarts. I think the ending of the film is a shade heavy-handed, but the rest of it is full of extraordinary satiric moments: The horrifying scene in which Eugen brings Franz to dinner with his parents. The vacation in Morocco, where the man* Eugen and Franz pick up on the streets is refused entrance to the Holiday Inn Marrakech -- though wouldn't a pretentious bourgeois like Eugen have chosen a tonier hotel? -- because it doesn't admit Arabs. (The employee refusing the entrance, himself an Arab, suggests that if they want boys, he could provide some from the hotel staff.) And the moment of truth in which Franz realizes he's been conned is shattering. Michael Ballhaus's vivid color cinematography is complemented by Kurt Raab's production design, especially in the garishly overdressed apartment which includes a chandelier hanging so low that guests have to walk around it, that Eugen puts together with the most expensive pieces from Max's antique shop. Only after Eugen and Franz break up does Eugen reveal that he hates the place: He has clearly condescended to what he thinks an uncouth working class guy would think is the height of fashion.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

*Played by El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), who had been deported to Morocco after a bar fight in Germany. Brigitte Mira, ben Salem's co-star in that film, also has a cameo as the shopkeeper who originally denies Franz admittance to her store to validate his lottery ticket until the suave Max flatters her into it.

Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Cruel Story of Youth

Makoto: Miyuki Kuwano
Kiyoshi: Yusuke Kawazu
Yuki: Yoshiko Kuga
Dr. Akimoto: Fumio Watanabe
Horio: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Music: Riichiro Manabe

In addition to the shamelessly exploitative title Naked Youth, Cruel Story of Youth has also been released as A Story of the Cruelties of Youth. So is it the story that's cruel or the youth in it? Those who know Japanese can probably tell me which is closer to the original title, Seishun Zankoku Monogotari, but I suspect the ambiguity is intentional. It's a cruel story about cruel young people, with the usual implication that society -- postwar, consumerist, America-influenced Japan -- is to blame for the cruelties inflicted upon and by them. With its hot pops of color and unsparing widescreen closeups, the film puts us uncomfortably close to its young protagonists, Makoto and Kiyoshi. Makoto is just barely out of adolescence -- Miyuki Kuwano was 18 when the film was made -- but carelessly determined to grow up fast. She hangs out in bars and cadges rides with middle-aged salarymen until the night when one of them decides to take her to a hotel instead of her home. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. But a young passerby intervenes and beats the man, threatening to take him to the police until the man hands over a walletful of money. The next day, Makoto and her rescuer, Kiyoshi, meet up to spend the money together. He's just a bit older -- Yusuke Kawazu was 25, three years younger than the film's director, Nagisa Oshima -- and over the course of their day together on a river he slaps her around, pushes her into the water and taunts her when she can't swim, and seduces her with his mockery of her inquisitiveness about sex. When he doesn't call her again, she seeks him out and they become lovers. They also become criminals: She goes back to her game of hooking rides with salarymen and he follows them, choosing a moment when the men start to get handsy with Makoto -- sometimes she provokes them to do so -- to beat and rob them. Naturally, things don't get better from here on out, especially after Makoto gets pregnant. We can object to the film's sentimental attempt to redeem Kiyoshi, who starts out as an abusive young thug but is transformed by love, and there's some awkward coincidence plotting, like an abortionist who turns out to be Makoto's sister's old boyfriend. But Oshima's portrait of a lost generation has some of the power of the American films that inspired it, Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), as well as the French New Wave films about the anomie of the young by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. It was only Oshima's second feature, but it signaled the start of a major career.

Turner Classic Movies

A Royal Scandal (Otto Preminger, 1946)

Charles Coburn, William Eythe, and Tallulah Bankhead in A Royal Scandal

Catherine the Great: Tallulah Bankhead
Chancellor Nicolai Ilyitch: Charles Coburn
Lt. Alexei Chernoff: William Eythe
Countess Anna Jaschikoff: Anne Baxter
Marquis de Fleury: Vincent Price
Capt. Sukov: Mischa Auer
Gen. Ronsky: Sig Ruman

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Bruno Frank
Based on a play by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller
Costume design: René Hubert

Sometimes it's better not to know too much about a movie, for example the fact that A Royal Scandal was to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo almost made one of her many rumored comebacks as Catherine the Great. Might have been tends to distract us from what was: a more-than-passable comedy about the goings-on in the court of the Empress of all the Russias. It was a notorious flop, however, and essentially ended any hopes Tallulah Bankhead might have had for screen stardom after her much-praised performance in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944). The film was savaged by the often unreliable but enormously influential Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: He called it "oddly dull and generally witless," though he faulted the script rather than Bankhead and the cast. I still think that if you go into A Royal Scandal with diminished expectations, you can find some fun in it. True, the script drags a little, and the central palace intrigue -- a plot to overthrow the empress -- is rather muddled in the setup. But it has some clever lines, and it has Bankhead and Charles Coburn to deliver them. William Eythe, a kind of second-string Tyrone Power, handles well his role as the naive soldier captivated by the empress, showing some shrewd comic timing, and Anne Baxter, as his fiancee and Catherine's lady-in-waiting, represses her tendency to overact. The faults in the film are generally more due to the director than the script. In Lubitsch's hands the romance might have been wittier and the comic-opera complications of the plot more effervescent. Otto Preminger, who took over after Lubitsch suffered a heart attack, was not the man for the job. As he showed with his first big hit, Laura (1944), Preminger was greatly gifted at handling scheming nasties and noirish perversities, but he was never one for costume-drama frivolities. What success he has with A Royal Scandal comes from giving a capable cast the reins.

Filmstruck

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)

Monsieur Hulot: Jacques Tati
Martine: Natalie Pascaud
The Aunt: Micheline Rolla
Englishwoman: Valentine Camax
Hotel Proprietor: Lucien Frégis
Waiter: Raymond Carl

Director: Jacques Tati
Screenplay: Pierre Aubert, Jacques Lagrange, Henri Marquet, Jacques Tati
Cinematography: Jacques Mercanton, Jean Mousselle
Music: Alain Romans

One of the delights of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is that Hulot himself is part of an ensemble. It's not just a showcase for Jacques Tati's gifts as a physical comedian. While Hulot is the presumed focus of the movie, with his stiff-legged bouncing gait and his pipe-forward ambling, the world around him is as sweetly eccentric as he is. From the opening scenes with the holiday-bound crowds rushing from one railway platform to the other, confused by the comically garbled announcements, to the sardine-packed bus whose driver discovers a small boy thrusting his head up between the spokes of the steering wheel, Tati the director swiftly establishes the satiric thrust of the film: the bourgeoisie determined to have fun even if it kills them. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is not gut-bustingly funny. Instead it's an assemblage of drolleries: slapstick moments like Hulot getting shut up in a folding canoe and being mistaken for a shark, mixed with smile-inducing bits like the strolling couple, she cheerfully leading him on excursions he clearly doesn't enjoy, as when she delightedly picks up shells, cooing over their beauty, which he tosses away once her back is turned. All of it is sweetened by a skillfully crafted soundtrack, from Hulot's wheezing and rattling auto to the irruptions of radio broadcasts in the hotel to the poink of the swinging door at the entrance to the dining room. I happen to think that the restored 114-minute version, assembled by Tati before his death, may be a bit too long, but there are many who can't get too much Hulot.

Turner Classic Movies

Coup de Grâce (Volker Schlöndorff, 1976)

Margarethe von Trotta in Coup de Grâce

Erich von Lhomond:  Matthias Habich
Sophie de Reval: Margarethe von Trotta
Conrad de Reval: Rüdiger Kirschstein
Aunt Praskovia: Valeska Gert
Dr. Paul Rugen: Marc Eyraud
Michel: Hannes Kaetner
Grigori Loew: Franz Morak
Franz von Aland: Frederik von Zischy
Volkmar: Mathieu Carrière

Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Screenplay: Geneviève Dormann, Margarethe von Trotta, Jutta Brückner
Based on a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Music: Stanley Myers
Film editing: Jane Seitz

Coup de Grâce is a film as chilly as its setting: a castle in Latvia in the bleak winter of 1919-1920, as the Bolsheviks begin to overwhelm their opponents in the Baltic states, many of whom are Germans determined to defeat the communists. The castle belongs to Conrad de Reval, who has gathered there some of the remnants of his forces, including his friend Erich von Lhomond. It becomes apparent very early, especially from the glances between Conrad and Erich, that they may be more than just friends. It's not so apparent to Conrad's sister, Sophie, who is still living in the castle along with her aged aunt. Sophie makes a play for Conrad, but it's only partially successful. To spite and to tantalize him, she begins to have affairs with some of the other men staying at the castle. Meanwhile, the castle comes under attack from the Bolsheviks, some of whom are also Sophie's friends. Margarethe von Trotta gives a complex portrayal of Sophie, but is somewhat undermined by the intricacies of the relationships among the various characters and the difficulty of sorting out their several backstories. We don't know enough about her, or Erich or Conrad, to get a full sense of why any of them behave as they do, other than the moral fatigue of having fought the war for so long. In the end, the film becomes most memorable for the performance of Valeska Gert, whose grotesque and macabre Aunt Praskovia steals every scene in which she appears. In the 1920s, Gert had been a silent film actress and a cabaret performer -- she would have fit right in with the "divine decadence" of the Kit Kat Kub in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972). Although Coup de Grâce has a strong final scene, the slackness of the narrative thread in the film deprives it of some of its impact. Still, good performances, an effective recreation of the historical period,  and the impressive black and white cinematography by Igor Luther make it worth seeing.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis in Solaris

Chris Kelvin: George Clooney
Rheya: Natascha McElhone
Gordon: Viola Davis
Snow: Jeremy Davies
Gibarian: Ulrich Tukur

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Steven Soderberg (as Peter Andrews)
Production design: Philip Messina
Music: Cliff Martinez
Film editing: Steven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard)

The self -- or the soul, if you will -- is made of memories. Which is why disorders of memory, like Alzheimer's, terrify us so: Who are we if we don't have our memories? Relationships, too, are made by memories -- or marred by the absence of shared ones, as Andrew Haigh demonstrated recently in 45 Years (2015). But what are you if you are made of someone else's memories? That's the provocative premise explored in this version of Stanslaw Lem's novel Solaris, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Steven Soderbergh. When it was released, it was widely regarded by some prestigious critics as too slow, as "ponderous and dreadful," as "opaque, self-indulgent, and just plain goofy." I don't know if the critical reaction has shifted over the past 15 years, but I think Soderbergh's Solaris is a worthy companion to the more critically lauded Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). They attempt different things: Soderbergh a meditation on love, loss, and identity framed in the conventions of the sci-fi film, Tarkovsky a personal exploration of humankind's alienation from nature. If, as I tend to do, you prefer deeply personal filmmaking to Hollywood glossiness, you may prefer Tarkovsky, but I honor what Soderbergh -- a personal filmmaker working with Hollywood stars and conventions -- has achieved. The presence of George Clooney does tend to skew the film a bit, partly because Clooney, like all movie stars, has a fixed persona, and when he works against his type -- the handsome, wisecracking, invincible leading man -- people tend to feel their expectations have been frustrated and become dismissive. Would Soderbergh's Solaris have been critically better received if he had been able to cast his original choice for the role, the chameleonic Daniel Day-Lewis? Perhaps, but Clooney gives the role of Kelvin his considerable all, and I think it's one of his best performances. He's well supported by Natascha McElhone as Rheya, whose increasing horror at discovering she's not human but instead a being crafted out of Kelvin's memories of his dead wife is touchingly presented, and by Viola Davis as Gordon, who masks her terrors with a facade of toughness. We've seen Jeremy Davies do twitchy perhaps once too often, but it works here against the more controlled personae presented by Clooney and Davis's characters. Soderbergh also wisely keeps the identification of what (or who) Solaris is -- a planet or some kind of galactic sentient entity? -- one of the film's unsolved mysteries. To go too far into explanations would have sent the film into routine science-fiction territory. Cliff Martinez's musical score neatly supports the otherworldliness of the film.

Cinemax