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)