TFE likes to focus on a film year in the buildup to the Smackdown. For the first half of June that's 2002.
Viola Davis at a Solaris premiere in 2002
There’s always something novel about seeing a current megastar at the beginning of their career. Who was this person before they became who they are now? How does their early work fit into their current persona? Can we catch a glimpse of the brilliant career that’s coming?
A solid example of this kind of retrospective would be the pretty good year Viola Davis had in 2002. She had appeared in small roles in six films before then but had yet to capture public attention on the screen. Fresh off her first Tony win in 2001 for King Hedley II, that began to change. In 2002 she had noteworthy supporting roles in three major films from high-profile directors, each operating in vastly different genres and released in the key November-December awards slot.
Her most high profile role that year was as Julianne Moore’s housekeeper in Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, still the best film Davis has appeared in...
Far From Heaven
She acquits herself well to Haynes’ peculiar tone, showing an easy familiarity with the other characters. The fact that Davis is able to imply a rich life offscreen we never get to see is surely the point, especially as a commentary on Cathy’s controversial liberalism.
Still, one wishes she could’ve gotten a corner of Far From Heaven to herself. I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if she’d accompanied Cathy on her trip near the end of the film, or what a Harge-Abby scene between her and Raymond might’ve been.
Antwone Fisher
Davis also gets a great, prominently showcased scene towards the end of Antwone Fisher, as Antwone's absent, abandoning mother. Eva May Fisher is already brusquely quiet before Antwone (Derek Luke) walks into her home, and becomes silent and stone-faced once she learns who he is, even fleeing to a different room in her house in shock. Her expression registers between total dissociation from the present moment and actively trying to repress whatever emotions are building inside her as Antwone recounts his life and the man he’s become.
One might fear this sequence could become an excuse for Antwone to unleash decades of anger at this near-mute woman, yet everything in Luke and Davis’ performances, in tandem with Denzel Washington’s generous direction, refuses to reproach Eva or make easy judgements. Her face is at or near the center of the frame for the majority of the sequence, with Davis’ withholding suggesting the hard, dire life she's led. It's tremendously moving, and concluding their scene by sitting with Eva May's unresolved sadness rather than Antwone's sense of fulfillment is among the strongest touches in this well-acted film.
Solaris
The third and most substantial of her 2002 roles comes from Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Russian classic Solaris. She co-stars as one of the few surviving scientists of a space station orbiting the titular planet. George Clooney, in a minimalist performances that's an effective precedent to Brad Pitt in Ad Astra, plays Dr Kris Kelvin who is sent to this outpost after receiving an S.O.S. from the station’s captain. He tells Kelvin there is something happening on the ship but refuses to elaborate. For whatever reason, he and his team are unwilling to return to Earth until they’ve figured “it” out.
When Kelvin arrives to the station on a small transporter ship, the captain is already dead and only Dr. Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis) remain of the original crew. Where Davies plays Dr. Snow with an assortment of odd tics and weird vibes, Davis is able to make Dr. Gordon a somewhat unsettling presence without reaching for any strong mannerisms or alien behaviors. She first meets Kelvin through her barely open doorway, refusing to let him enter her room or leave it herself. It’s a short, effective introduction to her character, staunchly refusing the idea that there could be a different version of events on Gibarian’s death before anxiously retreating back into her room after we hear something skittering around in there. Afterwards she gives a formal interview with Kelvin, reporting on her mental state (understandably depressed and fatugued, but otherwise fully functional) and her reasons for remaining on the Solaris station (stopping whatever has taken hold of this ship herself, therefore proving she’s smarter than it is).
Davis is able to list off technical jargon like she’s been studying the economic potential of newly discovered planets for years. More than that, she plays Gordon as emotionally legible as she is intellectually competent, rooting her reactions in her scientific analysis of the situation and her personal feelings about this shit rather than foregrounding one or the other. She and Snow are cagey about describing what exactly has happened on the ship, telling Kelvin there’s no point explaining anything until “it” has happened to him too.
She's a copy.
“It”, as it turns out in Kelvin’s case, refers to waking up in bed with his wife Rheya (Natasha McElhone), which is somewhat disconcerting because she didn’t accompany him on the transport to Solaris, and even more so because she died several years earlier.
All of the scientists are haunted by loved ones, living and dead, conjured from their brains by Solaris itself. Soderbergh depicts the entirety of Kris and Rheya's relationship for the next 30 minutes, alternating between their points of view and interspersed with their reactions to each other in the present. The already precise editing stretches to encompass these spatial and temporal dissonances, turning their relationship into a dreamy, demanding short film all its own. We don’t see Dr. Gordon again until after this seqeunce has ended, convening with them and Dr. Snow on how to back to Earth. Gordon opens the meeting by hypothesizing how to get rid of their visitors, theorizing what their molecular compositions might be and how to send them back to Solaris. She’s baffled by Kelvin’s desire to bring any remnant of Solaris back to Earth for further study, and considerably more repulsed that he thinks the Rheya sitting with him is someone he can trust, let alone a human being.
Davis doesn’t play Gordon as a coldly objective figure, so lacking in feeling as to be emotionally and thematically disconnected from the questions Solaris is built on. Nor does she overwork herself by pointedly spelling out any questions about Gordon the script avoids answering. We never know who her visitor is, or what exactly her relationship with them was on the ship, but when Kelvin accuses her of being ready to destory them without hesitation she’s on the verge of tears. The way Gordon talks about the visitors being untrustworthy, warning Kelvin against being seduced by this facsimile of his dead wife, is filled with history but doesn’t go so far as to specify whether or not she’s in the same “resurrected spouse” boat as him, even as it's clear something has happened. These implications take on a slightly darker dimension when she tells Kris she can't stand watching the apparitions resurrect themselves, again making a distinct, memorable impression that's all the more fascinating for the lack of context. Davis meets Soderbergh’s conceptually dense wavelength and adds a wider, more insinuating range of tones than her costars. I have no doubt that Soderbergh was involved in shaping her performance, but Dr. Gordon only exists through Davis' ability to convey character through mood and personality, adding ambiguities and complications to a role that barely exists on the page.
This last bit is, I think, the key connective thread between these roles and her future successes. As exhillirating as it is to watch her interpret a character as well-written and inviting to the actor as Rose Maxsom in Fences, few performers can breathe life into an underwritten role quite as vividly as Viola Davis. You can absolutely see her work in Solaris as a precursor to her authoritative, offhandedly charismatic government operative in Blackhat, to say nothing of her heroically and singlehandedly rewriting her section of The Help into a real movie.
I hope to see her headlining more films in challenging parts as soon as movies get released again. But in the mean time, her back-catalogue is filled with exciting, varied projects that’d be worth exploring even if we could go outside. And in Solaris she is truly exceptional, signalling the long career ahead of owning ambitious films that, for all their skill, are even better for her contributions.