.....

 

There's a big Christmas movie I can't talk about yet, but a certain publicly traded corporation is going to have a big bushel of coal in their stocking this season no matter how many quote courtesans put it on their top ten list. Yikes! Instead, I'll take a look at Solaris, Analyze That, the experience of seeing My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Greece, and one of the nuttiest, funniest movies I've seen this year, Estonia Dreams of Eurovision! which plays this week on Sundance Channel.

What is more beautiful than the one who has gone away?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, fantasy forgives, desire embellishes. Sentiments like these lie at the heart of Solaris, Steven Soderbergh's marital drama in a science-fiction setting. It's more “Scenes from an Intergalactic Marriage" than a true revisiting of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, with Soderbergh's usual take on female-male relationships as being essentially parasitic. Soderbergh's Solaris (which draws conspicuously from Tarkovsky's script with only a modest credit to its current rights holders), is a different beast from the Russian master's fatiguing 165-minute version.

In reviews of Soderbergh's Solaris, countless comparisons are being made to the earlier picture, which has just been reissued in a comprehensive edition. Tarkovsky’s quest , in his handful of films, is for the spiritual. 2002's Solaris, by contrast, takes on a narrower focus, a chilly skepticism about relationships that reigns in so much of Soderbergh's work—the eternal, inviolable unknowability of another.

Solaris, measured in its pacing, begins in a future Chicago of Blade Runner broodiness, a site of gleaming horizontals, indirect lighting and sluicing gray rain. The place of memory is a place of rain, the place of dreaming is drown. Rain falls like tears, a vale of translucence.

Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychiatrist whose troubled wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) died a few years before the story begins; he's still steeped in his private funk. A space station named Prometheus, circling the water planet Solaris, has cut off communication with Earth, and a cryptic video dispatch to Kelvin insists he's the only person who can right what's wrong. Once he's on the ship, after meeting the two remaining scientists on board (Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis) hallucinations are the order of the day, including one of his late wife, who can recall only what parts of her life her husband knew. "I'm not the person I remember," this apparition insists.

The production design is doleful, abundant in its cool dread. (Note Rheya’s first appearance on a train, a black handprint shimmering on a transparent divider as she leaves Kelvin's sight.) The prolific Soderbergh is a hands-on breakneck auteurist but also a superlative director of photography, with astonishingly beautiful metalline-gleaming cinematography, like the 35mm "fictional" portions of Full Frontal.

Darts of hate have been shot toward this sleek, dreamily paced film, such as the pitiless pissiness exhibited by internationally-known critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.  Roger Ebert took from this Solaris much the same feelings I did, aligning it with Soderbergh's obsessions.  Yet other reviews have been rife with a manner of possessive, you-don't-know-art exclusionary attacks that seem removed from criticism, yet very near clubbiness. It almost seems a kind of Rorschach for critics, ascertaining canonical reverence versus a filmmaker's right to explore a text after one's own fashion. (Should one never see a "Hamlet" after the first time, in high school, or college?)

Rosenbaum describes the admittedly slow 95-minute film as "funereal," and goes on to describe Viola Davis, a vivid actress even when standing motionless, as "a PC replacement for a white male in the original." Ascribing authorial intentions is a dangerous thing. To presume Soderbergh chooses actors for political reasons rather than talent seems specious, as does giving weight to whatever flip remarks Clooney has made about the 1972 Solaris being a lesser Tarkovsky film. The telegraphic quality rankles some critics, epigrammatic declarations such as "We are in a situation beyond morality!"; "It's the puppet's dream, being human"; "There are no answers, only choices"; and "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me!"

Soderbergh's film—let's not even call it a "version"—is earnest work. Its look is crisp, its actors striking. Jeremy Davies' discombobulated mannerist acting is freakish in its gestural specificity, and Clooney plays a man who stopped reacting after his wife died. McElhone, as a fantasy projection, is lit as a fantasy creature: a human being Kelvin could never decipher, a woman who he could only revere, and in the process, find the substantial abyss in their relationship to be a source of irritation.

It was intriguing to see the rapt attention of the paying audience I saw the film with, a rare treat for me. "I could tell you what's happening but I don't know that will tell you what's happening," Davies says early on. Even the sound design is muffling, distant, that of enplaned white noise, the soft yet damp susurration of travel thirty thousand feet or higher from earth's surface. Cliff Martinez's steel-drum echoic Steve Reich-like ache is one more strand of melancholy, one further swath of mood that makes Solaris closer to the work of Soderbergh colleague Mike Nichols than the mysticism of Tarkovsky or the frosty skepticism of Kubrick. There's truly only one indication, late in the film, that the earthbound portions are set in Chicago, when a subway train rushes past a transparent backdrop of the Merchandise Mart El station: zschoom, zschoom, zschoom.  In the end, there is neither life nor death, merely love in the city in a garden. The stubborn enigma in elusive riddles. The sorrow in the dream that is memory.

Asked to define comedy and tragedy, Mel Brooks famously observed that tragedy is my hangnail, comedy is you falling into an open manhole on your head. Aggression makes for disconcerting comedy, as Adam Sandler, among contemporary practitioners, has profitably proven. The sweetest laughs in Analyze That, the sequel to Harold Ramis’ super-successful 1999 Billy Crystal-Robert DeNiro vehicle, come out of pure, venom and hostility.

The setup’s familiar. Ordinarily, I abhor Crystal’s screen presence as much as that of Rosie O’Donnell—they’re the kind of appalling narcissists who swing from the chandeliers, yelling, “Lookit! Lookit, mom! I love me! I love me!” But when paired by always-crafty writer-director Harold Ramis and with DeNiro, in the first of his late career send-ups of his well-worn urban intensity, you can almost stomach the annoying schlub. It’s a double-dip conceit: anchovy-out-of-water DeNiro's neurotic mob boss Paul Vitti (a parallel inspiration to David Chase’s Tony Soprano) makes life very complicated for herring-out-of-water shrink Paul Sobol (Crystal). Add the comic gifts of Lisa Kudrow, as his skeptical fiancée, and Analyze This was the kind of effortless satire that hit with audiences worldwide.

A few years later, Vitti’s in Sing Sing, annoyed by a television program that looks suspiciously like The Sopranos. Oh, and the sudden threats on his life. What’s a mobster to do? Feign madness and sing “Maria” from West Side Story? The jokes are only intermittently effective, with one terrible scene involving Crystal’s facial paralysis at a sushi restaurant, but there are smart and nasty shockeroos throughout.

Outside, anarchists organize a protest. I'm at a theater behind the American consulate, paying my six euro to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding. In Greece.

About a hundred hold black flags and A-symbols flags on Tsimiskis Street in front of the same complex. "Front or back?" the middle-aged ticket seller asks in Greek. "Back," I say. I want to see how this crowd greets this Chicago-set phenomenon shot in Toronto, about the Greek-American diaspora, written by a woman from Winnipeg.

It's the sixth week of its run, the night before the International Thessaloniki Film Festival opens. The seats are reserved, and like with most movies in this movie-mad city, it's sold out. I return to the street, the city's Michigan Avenue. Shoppers file out of Bennetton and Marks & Spencer. The protest is over the arrest of an alleged terrorist; the issues go back to the 1970s and the American-supported military junta. In English, I ask one of the cops, who's wearing black head-to-toe motorcycle leather, what's up, and he shrugs and answers in my language "Another regularly-scheduled spontaneous demonstration."

At the concession stand, I buy a Heineken before taking my seat. As in every language, subtitles simplify. The occasional words in Greek get more laughter than the flatly translated jokes. But the room is with the movie. My local friends call it "My Big Fat Wedding," taking "Greek" for granted.

The biggest buzz is whenever Michael Constantine is on the screen. While both Nia Vardalos and John Corbett are essentially blanks that audiences worldwide are able to project themselves upon, with only a handful of distinctive characteristics, Constantine is a blustering, ineffectual father, a stereotype beloved of American sitcoms, but even more so among these Greeks from fifteen to fifty. This is laughter, loving: this man whose life is good only because of the women who surround him seems a tremendously familiar figure.

Back in modern Greece, outside the prefab gags about Greek-American life, I turn off Aristotle Square behind the shopping mall. A stocky policeman in full riot regalia leans against a gray marble wall like a shadow left by a nuclear flash. He listens to the crackling radio. A line of black extends up the block, the back entrance of the complex covered, two dozen cops cracking jokes. Cigarette smoke coils. I catch the eye of a woman with red hair. She stares at me from beneath her uplifted Lexan visor. I smile. She blows cigarette smoke toward me. Figures filter between the police, leaving another movie. There's an internet cafe one door past. Inside are ranks of boys of ten and eleven and twelve all locked into their first-person shooter games. "Malacca!" one yells, and then another twerpy voice squeaks out the same swear. A gorgeous night, the real world: a big fat Greek tapestry.

Marina Zenovich is a talented filmmaker under most people’s radar, but if you can, catch one of the two showings Sundance Channel has this month of her hilarious made-for-BBC doc Estonia Dreams of Eurovision! While she played a studio executive in Robert Altman’s The Player, she’s made three sweet documentaries since.

Independent’s Day captures the aspirations of filmmakers at Slamdance and Sundance, including Steven Soderbergh, Greg Mottolla, Neil LaBute and Tom DiCillo. Who is Bernard Tapie?, a charming, if frightening confessional documentary comedy of her three-and-a-half-year obsession with a mercurial French mogul, Bernard Tapie, a former politician and convicted criminal turned actor. Does she stalk him? Yes, and she frets on camera about it, and we love her for it.

For the third of her comic explorations of passion, Zenovich turns to the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual event in which small countries like Cyprus, Slovenia and Sweden compete to honor the most saccharine pop song you could imagine in, dare I use the words? “In the tradition of Abba.” From the chipper and increasingly oddball results, you can tell Taillin, Estonia wasn’t ready for Zenovich’s Nick Broomfield-by-way-of-Annie Hall interviewing style, but she wasn’t ready for the national soap opera that the tiny host country, which had won in 2001, played out as the 2002 contest was being prepared. Zenovich mixes personal musings with pointed interviews with many of the back-stabbing rivals in front of and behind the scenes of the show, and the snow-coated result is never sugar-coated, and it’s one of the oddest and funniest, near-unclassifiable things I’ve seen this year.

Estonia Dreams of Eurovision! Plays on Sundance Channel Wednesday, December 11, at 7:55pm and Thursday December 26 at 615pm, all times Eastern.

E-me: Can a truly rotten picture made with insane ambition—a grandiose folly—be as entertaining as true art?