Gravity: Just breathe
Photo: Warner Bros.
Gravity‘s 98-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes at this writing is appropriate.
WARNING: Review may contain mild spoilers. Click away now if that’s of concern. Thanks.
It isn’t a perfect film, but it is as transporting as everyone says, worth seeing twice — once in IMAX/3D, to appreciate the beautiful and terrifying collaboration of director Alfonso Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki, and once “regular,” to appreciate Sandra Bullock.
I didn’t see it on an IMAX screen (doing so would have made me irretrievably ill); in fact, I saw it at the Pavilion in Park Slope, a theater notorious for forcing the film-going experience to swim upstream in a salty river, flecked with a thousand paper cuts of environmental irritation and institutional ineptitude. (Much like that metaphor.) That Gravity took me by the elbows and held me in the story for 91 minutes, even at the Pavilion, is a testament to the film. Even at the Pavilion, Cuarón and Lubezki’s experience of space, its claustrophobic vastness, is a fantastic achievement, and the 2014 Oscars will mark the first time I root actively in the sound categories. The use of silence as implacable negative space, the switching between roaring terror and mute impotence…even the tinny, irritating crawl of music at the beginning has its purpose (not least, along with Ed Harris as the wry voice of Mission Control, to recall Apollo 13 and its floating, slowing cassette recorder). Breathing is nearly a character in Gravity: doing it, timing it, arranging for it.
It’s Bullock who brings all of it home. The emptiness and the great distances need that object in the foreground to give them meaning, and to an extent, the Ryan Stone character is that object, a fact Bullock incorporates into a performance that is completely, consistently believable. As I said, it’s not a perfect film, and the script is a little bit overcome with itself at times: tears lift off Stone’s face and array themselves before her in zero gravity as she prepares, both angrily and almost thankfully, to die, and it’s a liiiittle cheesy, both emotionally and from a showoffy-FX standpoint. Stone just didn’t need a dead child to make her more real. For the most part, though, the writing of that keeps it tight; Stone wears it with a credible scientist’s “just one of those things” attitude. But she also has a sequence in which she’s punching buttons and instructing Matt Kowalski (George Clooney, a note-perfect space cowboy) to give a message to her daughter about a shoe while capital-R Rising To The Occasion, and when you think about how many other ways an actor could play those lines, how very thin the tightrope is and how deep the chasms of schmaltz and Con Air on either side, it’s particularly impressive work.
Bullock’s existing Oscar doesn’t bother me too much — she’s a hard worker; I endorse her happiness — but her obit should now have a new lede, let’s put it that way. Cuarón and Lubezki have done glorious work here, conveying an almost documentary sense of how disconcerting and difficult (and at the same time freeing and exciting) weightlessness is, what it’s like to try to dwell in that state. But it’s nothing without Bullock, lying on the beach, pressed down by her ordeal and also by the very air of Earth. The camera gives you part of it; Bullock gives you the rest, in a relatable portrayal — everything we liked about Annie in Speed, dyed in the close-up wisdom of experience and grief — that’s a lot harder than it looks.
When she pulls herself up to standing at last, glorying in her full height, the shot positions her almost like the obelisk in 2001, a myth to admire. And it should.
Tags: Alfonso Cuarón Ed Harris Emmanuel Lubezki George Clooney Gravity Sandra Bullock
Interesting insight about the scene with Bullock lying on the beach. I took it a different way because I thought her struggle to rise was more about her legs (and muscles) being slightly atrophied from spending time in weightlessness. It seemed that she was symbolically learning to walk again – learning how to move herself forward again.
Agreed on the final shot though!
I’m internally LOL-ing at this entry as I recall your (Sars’s) very own disdain for “the woman, the myth, the Bullock” circa…what, 1998? (It’s in the archives somewhere.) Back then she was an easy target, a rom-com Everywoman cipher, turning in likeable but forgettable performances; now she’s an inarguable Actress, and I agree that Gravity is her best work by a long shot. I also agree with everything you say about the movie itself. I can’t get over the irony of such a quiet, intimate, borderline claustrophobic experience taking place in the infinite vastness of space, and the technological wizardry on display here is almost beyond words. I saw it in IMAX 3D and was in awe, but I think I’d also love to see it in plain ol’ 2D on a big screen. (I still haven’t made peace with 3D; I feel like it shrinks the scale and dims the contrast of everything on screen, making for a slightly lesser experience. Gravity is, blessedly, an exception.)
I’m not sure it was that long ago, actually. I wonder if part of what we’re seeing her is the Oscar giving her permission at last to take herself and her powers seriously. And relatable Everywoman is not a bad gig. There’s a reason I’ve seen WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING a kabillion times and it’s not entirely “like you just saw your first Trans-Am.”
I now make the Sad Face, because no matter how awesome a 3D experience anything might be, my partial blindness–and no, that’s neither a bad joke nor an appeal for sympathy–means that 3D works for me neither in real life nor in any theater. I really want to see “Gravity”, but every single review I’ve read indicates that it’s very much A 3D Experience more than a movie. Boogers.
@Jaybird, my review explicitly says the opposite, so you might give it a try. I think you’d get something out of it; it’s not like Avatar where that’s kind of its only thing.
@Jaybird,I saw it in 2D and it was gorgeous. Give it a shot.
Jaybird – I feel your pain. I’m partially deaf so good use of sound, especially directional sound, is completely lost on me. Good to hear (pun DEFINITELY intended) that the story stands up for those of us with less than great senses.
Despite her survival through everything that happens from, say, her arrival at the ISS onward being ridiculously improbable, I loved this movie and agree with you that Bullock’s performance really grounded it. And I’ve definitely never seen anything like this movie for evoking sheer, visceral body reactions.
I was hoping you’d write about this — just saw it yesterday (in IMAX & 3D despite being super-prone to motion sickness and BOY HOWDY I had to close my eyes at points)and it knocked my socks off. I did not expect it to hit me so viscerally (granted, I do have a 4-year-old daughter, so…), but I cried like a nut pretty much the whole way through and then some. I have never had a movie produce such a physical reaction in me (motion sickness notwithstanding), and I’m getting frustrated with all my friends on social media insisting they won’t/can’t go see it because “being abandoned in space is one of my greatest fears.” Uh, yeah, NO SHIT, and that’s part of what makes this movie so damn effective, jeez. If you’re too afraid to feel feelings at the movies, then maybe you should stay at home — as for me, I can’t wait to see this again.
@jive turkey
I was one of those people who, in the past several months seeing anything about this movie existing, kept saying (mostly to myself): “NOPE”.
But something about it was so compelling… maybe knowing the subject matter was in such capable, likable hands (in front of and behind the camera)… that I found myself deciding to take myself on a solo movie date to see it alone on Saturday night. I’m very glad I went to see it. (I also am blaming it for my ramped up anxiety levels the past couple days, but effective movies stick with you, eh?)
@#$%!!. I submitted that original comment before proofing/editing (which I usually try to do), and the bit about “every single review I’ve read” was not meant to stand. Sars, your review DOES state that the movie doesn’t particularly need 3D or IMAX, but it’s the first review I’ve read that makes that statement. I still want to see the movie, either way; it’s just that 3D stuff is such a sore point for me. More of one than it should be, really. Anyway, mea culpa.
No worries — I just don’t want anyone to be dissuaded from seeing it because the majority is saying that it’s The Gravity 3D Experience ™.
I just saw it tonight and I loved it. I never watch movies in 3D because they are not worth it and the effects are so obviously made to show SOMETHING-FLYING-AT-YOU (those extra three dollars you paid)! But in this movie I was so immersed in the story, in the film itself that I actually forgot all about 3D and effects and was flinching at debris. I love Sandra Bullock and this movie showed off her strengths very well. You are also spot on, Sars, I’ve waited many years to see the Annie from Speed again (albeit less shrieky).
Sooooo, no. The Mister wants to go see this (and with a kid and tight budget, we see less than one movie in the theater per year), but I don’t think I can.
Just watching the commercials makes my whole body curl up and go “…NOPE.” Drifting through space? Untethered? NOPE! I have a better chance of Prince Harry deciding to enter into a plural marriage with The Mister and my chubby American Jewish self than I have of going anywhere near outer space, but my body is still “NOPE!” at the very consideration of the idea.
But! Despite what Neil deGrasse Tyson is up to on Twitter, I am hearing sooooo many good things about this. Maybe I just need to take a Valium and go? I like Sandra Bullock (sat through The Proposal more than… well, a lot more than would be justified by my Ryan Reynolds problem), and The Cloon is usually a fun time…
Hmmm.
@Elisa – You are right about the 3D being so well done that you forget about it. I want to see it again.
And now I’m hearing/reading that to be truly accurate, Bullock’s character should have been wearing diapers. Because: Obviously. Not distracting or weird at all.
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