Saturday, October 5, 2013

Movie Review: "Gravity" (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)

FLOAT, SANDRA, FLOAT!: "GRAVITY" IS A RIVETING SURVIAL STORY
by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above: Sandra Bullock as an embattled astronaut in Mr. Cuarón's film
 
Nine years ago, director Alfonso Cuarón helped create one of the most wondrous sequences in modern cinema: the scene from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” in which a great winged beast glides over a wide gray lake, with the film’s young hero on his back.  To this day, that moment remains a true instance of striking beauty and it could be read as a precursor to the director’s latest venture, the sci-fi thriller “Gravity.”  But while “Gravity” is rife with visual poetry, it is also a mixture of hope and terror as astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) fights to survive. 

            In most films, that would be an easy task.  But “Gravity” takes place in space.  The film begins with Ryan and a crew of fellow NASA employees repairing the Hubble Space telescope from their space shuttle, the Explorer.  One astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) goes about the task with joviality, but Ryan remains queasy and terse.  Soon, it becomes clear that she’s right to be on her guard—within minutes of the film’s opening, Ryan and Matt receive word of a surge of space debris heading their way.  Soon, our heroes find themselves besieged fragments that rush forth like massive bullets, tearing the Explorer apart and leaving Ryan and Matt stranded in the cold emptiness of space.

            To state the obvious, this is a rather miserable situation.  Though Matt rallies his spirits, joking about his good looks and long career, survival seems impossible at best.  Worse, Ryan seems entirely dependent on Matt.  When she spins away from Earth, she’s helpless until he catches her and it is Matt who concocts a grand plan to save them both—to drift to the International Space Station and commandeer a space capsule back to Earth.  The plan inspires optimism in you, but a gnawing unease lingers.  It is Ryan, not Matt, who is the hero of the film and the chief avatar of audience affection.  But how can a hero inspire hope when she’s too afraid to act?

            The answer: she can prove herself.  Thankfully, “Gravity” is not set solely in the vacuum of space—it moves through cramped station corridors and capsule cockpits, letting us float in its detailed yet eerily unreal environment.  Threats as varied as minimal oxygen and raging fires thrive in these interiors, but it is here that Ryan finds her strength.  With steely tenacity, she begins to move from despondency to irritation, from irritation to heartbreak, and from heartbreak to manic determination.  Thus, the movie is not just about a mission gone wrong or some sensational special effects.  It’s an adult coming of age story in zero G. 

And just as Ryan endures, Ms. Bullock breathes life into each moment.  Sometimes, cinematographer Emmauel Lubezki frames her body drifting in midair and sometimes he catches her perspective as she floats forward like a human rocket.  But he also focuses on her face and at all the right moments, like when she begins goofily howling like a wolf before bursting into tears and most importantly, when she pilots her capsule towards a space station, declaring, “I’m your best friend!” to its massive hull.  It’s in these scenes that Ms. Bullock invests the film with all the humor and emotion she can muster, turning straight despair to eccentric optimism as the movie counts down to its final minutes while Steven Price’s score helps Ryan fight for a triumphant finish.

            “Gravity” needs that kind of humanity.  It’s a tense movie in which the clock is always ticking towards doom—the debris that destroyed Ryan’s shuttle are orbiting the Earth and every ninety minutes, she has to prepare for impact.  There are other obstacles too.  In one scene, Ryan has to pilot a Russian space capsule to a nearby Chinese station, only to find her ship caught in a mesh of rope.  With this ceaseless peril, you sympathize thoroughly with Ryan when, confronted by a rabid fire, she angrily snaps, “Now what?” 

Ms. Bullock delivers that particular line with entertaining poutiness, making the moment both human and funny—in addition to being life threatening, the situation really is just plain annoying.  But it should be said that most of the time, Mr. Cuarón (who edited the film with Mark Sanger and wrote it with his son Jonas) favors despair over annoyance, lingering not only on Ryan’s fear of death (“I know I’m going to die, but I’m still scared,” she says, alone in her capsule), but on her grief for her dead daughter.  Ultimately, emotional demons tear at her as brutally as the vacuum of space. 

And yet, for all this, Mr. Cuarón finds immense beauty within the film’s tense passages.  You may get queasy watching actors and safety ropes float through space (as I did) while Mr. Lubezki’s camera serenely rotates, but it’s hard to deny the smooth beauty of a world where actors don’t walk, but drift.  Or at least not until a supremely satisfying final shot that leaves you wired but also empowered, as if you’ve floated through the fire and are finally strong enough to go back.

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