Stellar Filmmaking - 'Gravity'

Gesundheit!

At some point I'll see Gravity again, and when I do I'm going to bring a stopwatch. I'll want one because next time I watch I plan on timing the length of director Alfonso Cuaron's trademark long takes, those meandering, uninterrupted shots in which he seems to film forever before finally cutting, giving his audience (and his actors) a much deserved breath. He uses these shots to spectacular effect in 'Gravity', even more so than in his terrific 2006 Children of Men, and though I know he must employ a palette of digital sorcery to extend and enhance those scenes you can't help but be utterly entranced by them. Entranced and fooled, as the scenes stretch on with such seamlessness, such extraordinary verisimilitude, you not only forget you're watching a work of fiction, you practically forget you're sitting in front of a screen at all.

The opening scene of Gravity must, I think, clock in at over three minutes, and that's a guess that errs on the conservative side. We're treated to an unbroken track-over of an astonishingly bright and blue planet Earth before dipping heron-like down to an orbiting space shuttle, there to join NASA astronauts hard at work repairing a telescope – we get so close we can read the decals on the sides of their instruments – and then, after a ride-along with Sandra Bullock so intimate it feels like an intrusion, swing back up and rejoin the grander cosmos, the little humans and their little machines suddenly a smudge on the lens. There are a hundred ways such a shot would come across as gimmicky and a hundred directors who would butcher any attempt to do it justice, but Cuaron can do these protracted cuts because he seems to understand how the human eye – and by extension, the mind – really works. The eye, being lazy, is naturally drawn first to blank space and then toward a single point on which it can focus. As soon as we have that focal point, like, say, an astronaut, the blank space is essentially forgotten while the eye instinctively tracks towards first one nearby object, then another, until the foreground is filled with action and the eye has to really go to work to discern everything that's happening. All the while the space behind the action turns merrily on, banking up or down, wheeling crazily clockwise or widdershins, or even turning 180 degrees around so the Earth is gone and the vastness of space is suddenly before us while we're none the wiser. By the time Curano pulls out again he's taken us on a roller coaster ride that we weren't entirely aware we were on in the first place and we find ourselves inexplicably breathless. The shot ends and the chorus goes up around the theater: “How the hell did he DO that?!”

It's a cool trick, to be sure, and a perfect device for the subject of this film, for what must it be like to float through space if not equal parts dreamy freefall and worst bungee jump ever, a melange of inspiration and terror with a dollop of humility throw in? Gravity gives us plenty to time to chew that over as Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts faced with the mother of all worse case scenarios, a disaster in space that leaves them cut off from Earth and flailing like moths in an updraft, a shared tether the only thing keeping them from being swallowed by the infinite void. (Note: in the interest of preserving the mood of the film I'm going to play this review pretty vague. I could deconstruct this film as I often do others, but to do so would be to limit the experience, if not diminish it outright. The trailers for Gravity had the right approach – showing less is definitely more – so I'll adhere to that philosophy speak in broad strokes. Trust me, it's worth it.)

Clooney is Matt Kowalski, spacewalker extraordinaire, a man so cool he stores rib eyes in his underwear; a dude for whom the unfathomable majesty of the unknown is comparable but not necessarily better than dollar beer night at the rib shack. Bullock is Ryan Stone, newbie genius, sent up to personally install a humdinger of a modification to the Hubble, her own design. When we meet her she's finding the view a little hard to handle, probably because her lunch is trying to come back up for a looksee of its own. It is, in every respect but the space thing, as routine a day at the office as one could possibly imagine. It borders on dull. Then the debris pelts their shuttle like a sideways hailstorm from Hell, a barrage of superheated shrapnel that perforates anything it touches. In the blink of any eye it's all gone; Stone and Kowalski are alone, grasping helplessly at cold vacuum. The circumstances are high-tech, but thematically we're talking that ancient, atavistic fear of being lost someplace – anyplace – where no one can hear you and no one can help you. And it is horrifying to behold. The disaster is so sudden, so merciless and indiscriminate we feel rage, though there's nothing to rage against, no antagonist toward which we can direct our hate; it's space, it is random and brutal. Like mission control we know something terrible has happened but we sit there in the theater as helpless as the commanders on the ground, desperate to reach out for Kowalski and Stone, to give them just that one tiny nudge that would bump them back on course.  But like any disaster seen from afar we are unable to do anything but watch, impotent, while uncaring space smacks them around like ragdolls. What follows is a survival story that essentially tosses your emotions in a sack and beats them like eggs in a pinata.

This might be a bad time...but do you wanna know how I got these scars?

Clooney and Bullock are the only actors in the entire film; there is no parallel narrative on the ground, no cigarettes-and-clipboards powwows back at Huston, no furrowed-browed Ed Harris declaring it ain't gonna happen on his watch (though Mr. Harris does lend his voice for radio chatter; his particular vintage of gruff, deliberate Jersey-speak is impossible to miss). Like their alter egos, Clooney and Bullock must carry the day alone together. What a terrific challenge for the actors: imagine having a perfectly pleasant conversation with a co-worker someplace nice on pleasant day; then imagine having to quite suddenly depend on that person for your life, having to cling to, clutch and manhandle the other to safety like you're playing the most invasive trust-building exercise ever. It's what Kowalski and Stone must do if they're to survive, though they'd been trading puke jokes and awkwardly flirting scant minutes before.

Moments of calm intercede between moments of abject panic, stunning contrasts that mirror space itself: the peace of stark silence versus the desolation all around them; the beauty of Earth so tantalizingly close versus the horror and doom that awaits them should they stray too far in one direction, slip from each other's grasp or even breathe too fast. Indeed, of all the unimaginable demands put on Bullock's Dr. Stone perhaps the most impossible from our perspective is Kowalski's ardent command that she control her breathing, take shallow drags from her dwindling air (“Remember,” Kowalski says of her oxygen supply “Wine, not beer. Sip, don't gulp.”) and rein in her panic long enough to...what? What exactly passes for a solution in a situation like this?? Whatever it is, matters of survival cannot be tackled passively. The script employs a clever trick to keep the danger ever-present and escalating; Kowalski and Stone are not out of danger once the debris has passed and are, in fact, in the path of an even worse calamity than the one that precipitated the disaster in the first place. Speed and decisive action is essential to their staying alive, but how can you move fast in a frictionless environment? How can you evaluate your options when there simply are none? Again, a hundred bad answers depending on who's got the camera. But Cuaron never succumbs to the Michael Bay explosions-solve-everything approach, or the J.J. Abrams technodazzle-the-audience technique, nor does he employ even a drop of Spielberg-ian sap. Instead he tackles these quandaries with all the relish of Hitchcock, elongating the suspense as he elongates his takes, making us grasp and tumble with our wayward astronauts and leaving us so on edge our back teeth hurt later.

It goes without saying Gravity is technically dazzling, the visuals spotless (space is a forgiving medium for visual effects, as anyone who worked the X-wings in Star Wars can tell you). For all the complexity of his big takes Cuaron shows admirable restraint in what he chooses to show, eschewing the loaves-and-fishes camera impossibilities and the refusing to hop on the shaky-quaky AuthentoCam bandwagon like so many movies this year (lookin' at you, Man of Steel). Instead we get clean pans, elegant set-ups and if not simplicity then at least the appearance of simplicity.

The best thing you'll ever see coming thru an airlock...

Finally, Gravity, in case you were wondering, is all about Bullock, who is simply magnificent. It is no accident that I choose to end my review on her. Too often we laud an actor by saying “Oh, she made it look easy!' Forget that. If any actress made this scenario look easy I'd be calling her a fraud and demanding her exile from the Screen Actor's Guild. Anyway, saying an actor makes something look easy is a gross oversimplification and a backhanded compliment to boot – it implies the average screen gawker has insight of the process that went into creating the role. No, in portraying Ryan Stone, Sandra Bullock makes it look hard. The physicality of her performance, the panic, the forced restraint, the savage gulping of air, the subtle shifts along a loaded emotional spectrum, the crumbling of her brave front, the teeter-tottering between despair and mule-headed tenacity, the sheer stamina Bullock exhibits during those ultra-long shots – all of it – is truly inspiring. It must have been hard. Hell, I know it was hard because I had to watch her do it from the comfort of a heated theater for two hours and I felt like I needed a Valium and nap afterwards. So yes, Ms. Bullock made it look hard, daunting, crushing, impossible; it is the greatest compliment I can give. When you look at her and say “Damn, I'm glad that's not me up there” you aren't just referring to her character up in space – you're referring to the actress trussed up in those rigs and harnesses, dangling in those 360-degree camera controlled green screen chambers, acting her heart out to absolutely nothing while the stopwatch keeps counting and Cuaron films on, demanding “More, more!” I feel like, as with Plato and the allegory of the cave, we have finally met the real Sandra Bullock, not the pale shade we've seen flickering on the wall in crap rom-coms and two-star dreck with which she's paid her dues in Hollywood for twenty-plus years. If she does not score at least a nomination come Oscar time, I will declare some serious shenanigans.