EVANOC

Finally I've figured out John Sayles. I have seen a lot of his movies (Lone Star is my favorite and gets my highest recommendation if you haven't already seen it) but he remained sort of a cipher as a moviemaker to me up until now. His casts are always so huge and impressive, true ensembles. He usually tackles trying to capture a place and the feeling and tensions within those places (sometimes he does this with an era, as he did with the late 1910's in Eight Men Out). And sometimes, some of his actors, plot devices, and filmmaker's twists and turns seem so contrived and nearly phony. What I've figured out about Sayles is this: he is essentially making melodramas, movie soap operas that are elevated above the daytime television trash by consistently strong acting, careful and well-planned interweaving of plot lines, and a sharp sense of atmosphere.

Sunshine State is one of Sayles' most unabashedly melodramatic works, and, as a result, one of his strongest. He finally seems to submit to his melodramatic tendencies that made some of his other films, like City of Hope and at points Limbo, seem ludicrously unreal. The story is many-pronged. In the Florida resort town of Plantation Island, there are two disparate communities: Verona Beach is the white seacoast town and Lincoln Beach is its black cousin across the island, a throwback to the segregationist South. Both towns are in varying states of economic despair and cultural disintegration, and are equally at the mercy of wealthy land developers who want to gobble up the area to bulldoze the island. The parallel structure that Sayles employs is not new to him (he talked about both the Mexicans and the Texans, and their interrelationships, in Lone Star to similar effect) and he extends it here to tell the stories of two families, one white and one black.

Marly Temple (Edie Falco) unhappily operates her family's Sea-Vue motel and greasy spoon seafood restaurant after her father Furman (Ralph Waite) loses his sight and falls ill (the mother, played by Jane Alexander, is a dotty community theatre doyenne and greyhound activist). Developers want to take the run-down land from the Temples, with its prime beachfront property and convert it to a tropical paradise of retail shops. The company, represented by landscape designer Timothy Hutton, and golf-playing overlord Alan King, infiltrates the lives of the town's denizens throughout the movies. On the flip-side is the black community, similarly falling prey to developers. Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) returns home to visit her mother Eunice (Mary Alice) with her new husband, a gentrified anesthesiologist from the North (James McDaniel) in tow. There are skeletons in each family's closet and the specter of segregation and racism hangs over it all, but now they face a common foe in the land developers.

Sayles' greatest asset has always been his casts and his creation of characters for those casts, and Sunshine State is a foremost example of that strength. Great character actors like Bill Cobbs, as the Lincoln Beach legend who leads anti-development protests, Mary Steenburgen, as the overeager planner of the town's Buccaneer Days, and Gordon Clapp as her suicidal husband, are all on the periphery of the story. As with any ensemble picture, and Sunshine State is one in every sense of the word, there are standouts. Here in particular, I was drawn to Ralph Waite, totally immersing himself in the anti-Papa Walton, Timothy Hutton, whose screen charisma seems to increase with age, and Edie Falco, once again proving herself as one of the strongest, most independent actresses working today on big and little screens (and I say that without ever seeing The Sopranos). But commendations are deserved all around the cast. Sayles too has created a mood in which his character sketches flourish, and his talented actors just run away with them.

To return to the notion of Sayles' movies as melodramas: they all have a contrived feeling, as if the audience can map out the various twists and turns and figure out the character connections before they are made clear onscreen. There is greater epiphany in the self-discovery and when the thing actually happens that the audience suspected all along, it is inconsequential. In some of Sayles' films, I think that this is a detriment; in Sunshine State, I think it only helps bring the story into the consciousness of the viewer. By engaging the audience proactively, Sayles gives his seemingly clichéd situations and connections emotional gravity. Everything now seems to have a purpose even if you figure out that purpose long before Sayles does. This way, he achieves a sort of milieu, a sense of time and place and people, that exist long before the movie starts, and will continue exists long after the final shot (which is comically ingenious). The melodrama is too engaging to be hokey and too real to be ludicrous, and that is what saves Sayles.

After just seeing Solaris, I have worked and re-worked my thoughts on Steven Soderbergh to a point that I think is finally expressible. Let me start by acknowledging Soderbergh's obvious and pure talent; it is total, visually evocative as well as thematically minded, and his films are often a pleasure to watch for their keen cinematic intellect. However, I tend to think, particularly after Solaris, that Soderbergh is still searching to channel that boundless, preternatural cinematic gift into his great masterpiece. His career has been spotty so far. Between films, and even within films, he can go from inspired to pretentious film-school brat in a matter of shots. His more successful ventures (at least the ones I have appreciated the most: Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic) have contained only a modicum of that generic, `indie' (which I use pejoratively) and a lot of worthwhile bits. But Soderbergh is still searching for something, a genre, a style, an expressive voice, maybe even a muse. I like to think of his movies as exercises. Traffic was an exercise in using an Altman-esque sense of scope and interlocking stories to politically condemn the American involvement in the drug trade. Out of Sight was an exercise in creating a cool, up-to-date crime caper and giving two of our sexiest and most bankable STARS meaty roles. Sex, lies, and videotape was an exercise in seeing exactly how far the early independent filmmaking scene could be stretched. Et cetera, et cetera. Solaris is just another installment in his succession of filmic exercises.

All of the director's usual production values are in place in Solaris, and they are more effective than ever: The jittery handheld camera for intimate scenes, the blue filters for emotional distance, and the fabulous movement-cinematography (this time, as usual, by Soderbergh, with nom de cine). Solaris' (and Soderbergh's) best visual creation is the solaris itself, a swirling nebula of pink and orange. He keeps returning to this image, as if he knew it would become the one with the most staying power.

I mentioned all of these visual components first, because they fully overshadow any plot or characterizations that might be present in the movie. Essentially, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychologist asked to journey to Solaris, a space station floating dangerous close to the aforementioned pink nebula. He has been summoned because of some extraordinary goings-on at the space station that basically remain unnamed throughout. To add a dimension to Kelvin, he is grieving over the loss of his wife (played by Natascha McElhone in a very muted, nearly plastic performance). The reason Kelvin was summoned into space stays as nebulous as the solaris: weird things have been happening and the remaining crew members (Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies, both passable in their parts and well-cast) have been visited by facsimiles of their deceased loved ones. All three reach a psychological breaking point when Kelvin is visited by his dead wife and ethical issues over her existence, the fine line between life and death, and her proposed termination arise.

That is basically all there is to the plot, and why an emphasis is better placed on Solaris' production values. This seems like an aesthetic, stylistic exercise for Soderbergh. He is merely playing with eye candy, cloaking a thin script (a supposedly thin adaptation of Tarkovsky's classic film of the same title) in a lot of evocative stuff. But there isn't much here, not much for audience and director alike to sink their teeth into, and it seems as if Soderbergh knows that.

To hit upon George Clooney for a moment, this is one of his more serious-minded performances but that by no means suggests it is his best. Clooney, one of the sexiest men in movies by default, has risen above all his star power by making the most consistently smart movie choices of anyone in Hollywood. I don't know if this is as smart a move for him as, say, David O. Russell's Three Kings or the Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but it is interesting and shows balls. He tampers down his inherent charisma in Solaris, but when he allows it to shine through, those moments constitute some of the best scenes in the film. Whatever you make of his performance, it is a gutsy one for a star of his caliber, even if the material isn't particularly groundbreaking or even well-constructed.