"Gravity"

In an article titled “Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Film Study”, Boston University film scholar Ray Carney said the following about Hollywood filmmaking:

“The superficiality of the experience is in fact what many viewers love about Hollywood movies. They take you on a ride. You climb into them, turn on the cruise control, and sit back. Not only are the events, characters, and conflicts entirely predictable (most movies are their trailers), but there is nothing really at stake for anyone–actor, director, or viewer–in any of it. It's an amusement park ride–a few programmed thrills and then all is well. When it is over, you leave the theater and go home untouched and unchanged.” (excerpt from http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/showbiz.shtml)

While I respectfully disagree with Professor Carney’s negative view, I can see exactly where he’s coming from. It is true that many Hollywood films – particularly action films – offer an experience akin to amusement park rides. I just happen not to consider that to necessarily be a bad thing. And Alfonso Cuaròn’s Gravity demonstrates this point better, perhaps, than any film made in the past twenty years – with the possible exception of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Watching Gravity in 3D is exactly like being on the most exciting of rollercoaster rides.

Or is it really? After all, rollercoaster rides offer much more limited emotional experiences. They do not immerse you in a character’s emotions or story. Even in “narrative” rides like the Phantom Manor in Disneyland, you never lose the slightest awareness that you are a spectator riding in a seat. The ride that comes the closest to achieving this level of engagement is Star Tours, and even rides such as those cannot be considered cinematic, as they rely on moving seats and an automate placed in front of the screen.

From that perspective, Gravity could be considered the missing link between Star Tours and cinema. From the opening 17-minute tracking shot to the final low-angle shot of Sandra Bullock standing triumphantly on the beach, her arms up in the air as she welcomes life back, Gravity does a masterful job of transferring the viewer’s consciousness into its film space and giving them a false but uncannily convincing impression of full immersion.

This is achieved by long, seamless tracking shots that count as some of the most virtuosic ever put to screen: Like most great long tracking shots, they do not draw attention to themselves but gently guide the viewer in an exploration of the film space. The setting in actual space is perhaps the best possible justification for their existence, as there are few obstacles to obstruct the camera’s trajectory. The movements are slow, and at times, Cuaròn’s camera appears to be gliding along with its actors. Not since Stanley Kubrick’s space waltzes in 2001: A Space Odyssey has the impression of space motion been so well conveyed.

Of course the fundamental difference between Kubrick and Cuaròn’s approach lies in Cuaròn’s emotional proximity to the protagonist of Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock in a career-topping performance), exemplified by the visibility of the electronic displays on her visor in subjective shots. The length and combination of these tracking shots and subjective shots – the former often overlapping into the latter – allow for a detailed exploration of a wide range of human emotions.

And this is where we get to the heart of what Gravity achieves that makes it more than a glorified rollercoaster ride. Cuaròn immerses the viewer into his film with a dual purpose: To excite them and to put them face to face with their own humanity. It is puzzling that the actress tasked with the gist of such a job should be one of the most recognizable film stars in the world. Are movie stars not movie stars precisely because they appear to be more than human to us? Do we not idolize them because we project the best of what we like in ourselves and each other into them? Surely a lesser known actress would be a better cypher, I thought to myself. And yet, in spite of it all, Sandra Bullock succeeds far beyond anything I would have expected. There isn’t a trace of the movie star in her. Never has she been so human, not even in her likeable “everywoman” roles in films like Speed. She runs a rich gamut of emotions with an authenticity reminiscent of Charlize Theron and Gena Rowlands. Fear, panic, resignation, weariness, frustration, ecstasy. She expresses all these emotions and more as if she were experiencing them for the first time.

That’s what I called “the gist” of the transmission of human experience.  The rest of it is taken care of by the wide range of shots covered by Cuaròn – and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, whose previous partnership with Cuaròn resulted in his masterpiece Children Of Men, the best film of 2006. Mostly liberated from the shackles of natural and man-made constructions, the camera is free to multiply shot sizes and angles without ever breaking. This is something that few other long takes have achieved, with perhaps the notable exception of the breathtaking opening three-and-a-half minutes of Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil. This technique, combined with the frequent subjective shots and 3D, alternatively makes the viewer a partner of Dr. Stone or Dr. Stone herself.

The remarkable Bullock-Cuaròn-Lubezki trio helps transcend occasionally facile characterization that sometimes succumbs to rather irritating gender stereotypes. Dr. Stone’s companion for half of the film is Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a handsome and flirtatious veteran who uses his cool charm and wit to calmly guide Dr. Stone through the long and perilous ride back to the space module after debris send them adrift and kill their coworker Shariff (Paul Sharma). During that ride, he gets Stone to calm down by getting her to talk about her civilian life. It is there that we learn that her post-work routine consists of driving endlessly without purpose, something that she has been doing since the accidental death of her 4 year-old daughter. It’s a very common Hollywood trope that I’m getting a little weary of: A character’s problem is stated and represented by a metaphor – in this case, also a parallel to much of her situation throughout the film – that will get a callback later as she overcomes it – in this case, when she accepts her daughter’s death and uses it not as an excuse to give up and hope to be reunited with her in a hypothetical afterlife (Stone is heavily implied to be an agnostic) but as an impediment to keep on living.

The character of Dr. Stone in and of herself is not a problem. Her backstory in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem is the way her problem is resolved, and the way her rapport with Lieutenant Kowalski is written. Both are adequately summed up in the film’s worst scene: Alone in a space module whose battery has run down, deprived of Kowalski’s guidance due to his sacrificial death tens of minutes earlier and left with no hope of being rescued, Stone gives up and waits for her death. Suddenly, she hears a knock on the door. An astronaut outside opens it and gets in. Who should it be, but Kowalski, alive and well! With his usual charm and humour, he reminds her of her flight simulations, cheers her up and suggests ways for her to get around her predicament. The camera – which, typically, has been showing this in one shot – pans closer towards Dr. Stone, then back to the left to reveal that this, indeed, was just a hallucination/dream. But it provides Stone with the necessary motivation to keep fighting for her life and win.

The problem of this scene is twofold:

 

-          Firstly, it gives the viewer the feeling of being cheated. Everything they have seen so far has stayed very securely within the boundaries of realism. Seeing a character whose death – in the film’s realistic context – is quite unequivocal, suddenly reappear is a distracting break from immersion. George Clooney (who incidentally pitched that scene as an uncredited script contributor) is a super-famous film star not known for dying in his films, so killing him off in the first half of the film appears quite bold. His apparent survival thus strikes the viewer as a betrayal of that apparent boldness, and the confirmation of his status as a hallucination feels like an attempt to cover up the mistake.

-          Secondly, it plays to the simplistic gender stereotype of the woman as easily succumbing to emotional duress and needing a man’s calm authority and seductive appeal to stabilize her and motivate her. I readily concede that most women are more emotional than men are, but it is precisely because Dr. Stone is an astronaut – one of the most physically and intellectually demanding jobs in the world – that such overreliance on Kowalski’s guidance irritates me.

Yet Gravity succeeds as a human story in spite of these Hollywoodian contrivances and conventions because of Bullock’s never-endingly committed performance and Cuaròn’s careful attention to her character’s emotional journey. It surpasses Danny Boyle’s decent 127 Hours and even Cast Away – Robert Zemeckis’s best film – as a tale of endurance beyond all possible prior experiences. It does not reach the majesty or profundity of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the poetry of Wall-E (though both Stone and Wall-E make similar use of a fire extinguisher), and I confess to not having seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris yet. But in its successful transportation of the viewer’s consciousness into a veritable realm of fictional space, I consider it a successful work of art and a possible trailblazer for new possibilities. We may be surprised at the new places Gravity could take cinema.