Gravity Review Part 2

Even though it touches lofty themes regarding the human condition,  “Gravity” also provides wondrously lucid spectacle of the highest order, with Cuarón putting current Hollywood directors to shame through his precise blocking and staging of action set pieces. With elaborately Ophüls-esque long takes providing a vice-grip command of audiences’ heart rates, Cuarón utilizes staunchly classical filmmaking grammar whilst bringing it to life through the latest digital technologies – resulting in a beautiful melding of the old and new.

     First, one might approach the issue of the relative “lack” of narrative complexity – that this is somehow a negative trait in and of itself. This kind of superficial reading of a film betrays the inherent potential the cinema carries – that meaning beyond that of the “plot” at hand can be inferred through visual, aural, emotional manipulation. The image is the medium; story is simply a consequence that comes about through montage (Kuleshov). The meaning posits itself in the interior inspirations a director imbues in said image, and it is through this (this is why Brakhage “works”) where the impact (whether intellectual, artistic, or emotional) is delivered.  If a film were just a “story”, of what use would an image provide? Like Nicholas Ray said, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”

Even on a base emotional level, “Gravity” does its job with aplomb. Though I have never been a fan of Sandra Bullock, but she does wonders here, effortlessly conveying the wide gambit of emotions she cycles between. This is a transformative, terrifically subtle turn, in which Bullock is more than up to the considerable task of carrying the film.

The character beats, while traditional, work marvelously – with Cuarón and Bullock selling Stone’s transformation from panicked desperation to fearless tenacity. Once we arrive at the finale, Stone plummets through the atmosphere in a great field of fiery majesty (back to the birth imagery, one can see the sequence resembles sperm piercing the ovum).  

Stone, not coincidentally, decides to let go of her daughter and the guilt harbored before she returns to Earth. This is made visual when the pod lands in the ocean and begins to flood. Her spacesuit, the specter of death and the guilt that comes with it, is shed, keeping her from drowning. It is when she emerges onto the island shore (not so subtly evoking the Galápagos) where she is shown as a new creature, ecstatic but struggling as she juts forth from the primordial ooze. The images of evolution lay bare on the screen. Cuarón, and by extension Stone, have earned that literal display of rebirth.

Godard once said, "The cinema is Nicholas Ray." That sentiment holds true (one need only watch "Johnny Guitar"), but if I were to provide an addendum, I would posit that “Gravity” is what American cinema should strive for – a return of auteur-fueled studio spectacle where story is the conduit in which the image is paramount to imbuing the narrative with the filmmaker’s distinct fixations and themes. With the continued use of Hollywood-sanctioned, coverage-based shooting (where image creation is an afterthought, leaving the scraps to be sorted out in post), Cuarón offers a rebuke of this horrendous tendency, returning the image to its rightful throne, a wondrous conduit through which the mindscape can be projected.

Before moving forward, cinema needs to look backward, and peer upon the silent era, where the image was king (Vidor). Cuarón is leading the charge within the studio system, and for that I am grateful. 

 Pair:

Gravity Review Part 1

Both a virtuoso display of Mann-esque muscular filmmaking as well as a sobering humanist tract, “Gravity” plumbs the depths of the human soul.

The story concerns Dr. Ryan Stone (portrayed by a Madonna-like Sandra Bullock), who, as a Mission Specialist, is on her first mission in the depths of space – working on the space shuttle Explorer. She is joined by George Clooney’s Kowalski – a smooth ladies man veteran astronaut who, whilst thrusting around on a propulsion-fueled jetpack, is having a ball on his final expedition. Stone, obviously a little shaky due to her relative inexperience, and Kowalski – in the process of working on the electronics modules outside the Explorer – receive a distress message from Houston (voiced Ed Harris, space picture veteran) that the Russian demolition of a satellite has caused a vast field of debris to barrel towards them, a veritable field of space shrapnel.

We watch rapturously as the formerly serene, still beauty of space is perverted into a cacophony of shredding metal and terrified, muffled gasps as the Explorer is decimated. Stone, now acting as a centrifuge due to her connection to a mechanical arm that links her to the ship, detaches herself, and out drifting into the void she goes, hyperventilating, panicked. Lost among the vast expanse of stars, she must make her way to a nearby international space station if life is to remain in her grasp.

All this information is communicated in one solitary long-take, which is thirteen minutes long – without a cut. Using CGI technology to its fullest extent, Cuarón (at the top of his powers, working with the inimitable Emmanuel Lubezki) glides his camera through the scene, setting up the relations of the characters as well as their relationship with the environment around them through masterfully precise mise-en-scene. Though many articles (here) it has been posited that “Gravity” could be classified as an animated film (Bullock’s and Clooney’s visages remain the only facets not manipulated by CGI), but the abundance of ones and zeroes that dot each frame are so immaculately sculpted that that the artifice drifts away.

The canvas Cuarón paints this tale upon is literally cosmic in scale, and in accordance with said scale, the images that he produces are massive in their dense cultural cachet. Mainly Cuarón utilizes archetypal imagery (primarily images that pertain to birth), putting loaded iconography onscreen in a manner that does not seek to posit banal symbolism, but rather to render the torment (and later, triumph) of the soul through elemental semiotics.

Upon reentry, when Stone assumes the fetal position, while it does work on a basic, rudimentary level (as a visual metaphor for the character’s rebirth), the imagery is also, more importantly, a cruel cosmic reminder of her deceased child. Stone is shown, in this gesture, to be flogging herself – image as expression of interior agony. It is here in which we must succumb to the wavelength Cuarón is operating on. 

Cuarón, rather than simply providing an elegant survival story, gives an allegory that tackles the process of grieving. It is an existential tract in which humanity (in the form of Stone) examines its relationship with death. Everywhere Stone turns, an element of her surroundings is a reminder of her child (relating to her daughter’s manner of death, Stone also violently hits her head while attempting to extinguish a blaze; the centrifuge-like mechanical arm Stone is attached to resembles a crib mobile). Space is purgatory – where each element externalizes inner trauma.  When looked at through this lens, the film begins to resemble another film examining humanity’s struggle with grief and death: Tarkovsky's “Solaris”. Both are achingly spiritual paeans dealing with the powerlessness of mankind in the face of mortality.

Cuarón thus makes the subjective interior concrete exterior through the bombastic imagery on display. This story of loss could ostensibly take place in any locale, but the environment affords the tale extra metaphorical heft, as space becomes a character unto itself, standing in for the death (oppressive, omnipotent) that surrounds her and weighs on her soul. 

(Continued in Part 2)