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. 

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