November 27, 2002 | If ambition and audacity were enough to sustain a film, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris would have a legitimate claim to instant-classic status.

What we have here is a multi-million-dollar bundle of art-house esoterica and metaphysical musing, propelled by Soderbergh’s seemingly irresistible urge to remind the world that, never mind his embrace by Oscar (Traffic) or his mainstream successes (Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich), he’s still an edgy, indie maverick who uses the system only for his own ends. That is, he’s not so much a sell-out as a subversive.

Unfortunately, even though it’s appreciably more engrossing – and much, much less insufferably smug – than his similarly defiant Full Frontal,  Solaris remains a technically proficient but emotionally arid folly, the work of an immensely talented auteur who takes an almost perverse pleasure in working against his own greatest strengths as a storyteller while in pursuit of a dubious artistic ideal.

Based on a well-regarded novel by Stanislaw Lem – which previously was filmed in 1972 by noted Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky – Solaris begins in the moodily-lighted environs of an unnamed, vaguely futuristic city. Psychologist Chris Kelvin (a game George Clooney) goes through the motions of life and work like a man on automatic pilot. When he responds to a videotaped summons from an old friend aboard a space station near the far-off planet Solaris, you get the feeling Kelvin is grateful for the emergency: He desperately wants and needs something to take him away from the familiar, and out of himself.

Once he reaches the Prometheus space station, however, Kelvin finds his friend has committed suicide, and an investigative team from Earth has inexplicably – and, it’s strongly hinted, permanently – disappeared. Only two surviving scientists are on board Prometheus: Snow (Jeremy Davies), a fuzzy-headed fellow who comes off as a heavily tranquilized version of the jabbering Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now (or a self-satirical version of the Jeremy Davies character in several other movies); and Gordon (Viola Davis), an increasing paranoid rationalist who warns of unexpected dangers and unwelcome visitors.

During his first night on the space station, Kelvin gets a not-entirely-unwelcome visit from Rheya (Natascha McElhone), his beautiful wife. This greatly unsettles the good doctor, and not just because he made a solo voyage to Prometheus. You see, Rheya died several years ago – the result of suicide, we gradually learn – so the person sharing Kelvin’s bed may not be whom she claims. In fact, judging from the way McElhone has been photographed to make her face in close-up look like something sculpted out of clay, Rheya might not even be human.

Not surprisingly, Solaris doggedly refuses to provide answers to the myriad questions it raises. Fairly early in the film, Soderbergh makes it clear that he’s making poetry, not prose, and that he’s more interested in rhythms and images than cause and effect. Just is case we miss the obvious, a character pointedly rebukes Kelvin for being too analytical: “There are no answers, only choices.” Well, yes.

It appears Soderbergh, fully funded by a major Hollywood studio (20th Century Fox), chose to make one of the most lavishly produced enigmas in film history, teasingly alluding and purposefully obfuscating while constructing a puzzle-box certain to inspire websites and chat rooms devoted to impassioned hypotheses and arguments by admiring fans. In short, he made a cult movie in search of a cult.      

With its time-tripping structure, erratic rhythms, non-synchronized sound riffs and expressionistic color schemes, Solaris clearly is of a piece with such earlier Soderbergh efforts as The Limey and Out of Sight, films that cannily deconstructed and reassembled conventional genre plots.  The big difference is, the latter films were grounded -- and, more important, disciplined -- by the demands of those traditional narratives. Solaris gives us Soderbergh unbound, freewheeling and self-indulgent as he follows his muse. Trouble is, very much like the space station in which most of the “action” takes places, Solaris ultimately collapses into elaborate swirls of impenetrable gas.