More and more lately I’ve been surprised by the reaction of family, friends, and acquaintances who have seen Alfonso Cuaron’s film “Gravity.” Most liked it, but their admiration was mild, and mostly overshadowed by their stronger liking for other 2013 films: Twelve Years A Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Philomena, Blue Jasmine, Wolf Of Wall Street, Nebraska, August: Osage County, etc. By now I’ve seen all of them and I remain convinced that, 20 years from now, Gravity will outlive them all. And after watching Gravity a second time, I think I know why.
Mine is probably the last generation of movie-going grownups. Today’s moviegoers are mostly teens too young to access the bars, clubs, and concerts that form the core social life for people in their twenties and thirties. In our day, movie-going remained a major and frequent “date” option well into parenthood. But even for my generation, reactions to films tended (and still tend) to be vague: “I loved it”……“It was great”…“the best movie I’ve seen this year.”
I had the good fortune to learn about movies from Guy Leger, a French Dominican priest who taught philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris but also had deep personal and professional connections to French cinema. His father owned a movie house in Bordeaux, so he grew up with film in the early 20th century. After serving in the French military he took his best army friend home and introduced him to the movies. That friend was André Bazin, who became the godfather of modern film criticism, founded the preeminent film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and inspired the French New Wave (which gave us classics like François Truffaut’s 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond) before his early death in 1958.
For Guy Leger, cinema was nearly a sacred art, and he demanded more probing reactions from his students than “I loved it.” And his starting point was a radical challenge to all of us. Nearly every weekend he would repeat his creed: “If you have not been trained in cinema, you may completely miss the movie on the screen.”
At first, I was skeptical about this: how could moviegoers not see the movie in front of their eyes? Yet over the years I have seen example after example. Gravity is just the latest example--but it may be among the most powerful. The more I talk to people about it, the more I think that most people went to Gravity but saw something else.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie which so powerfully combines vision, craft, grace, and even poetry.
Ironically, the trailers that showed on TV and in theaters gave the impression of a fast-moving, action-packed special effects extravaganza--and I guess many people walked out believing that’s what they had seen.
But in fact Gravity is one of the slowest movies in memory. The first shot lasts 13 minutes, the first two shots last 18 minutes, and the first scene lasts 40 minutes of real time--nearly half of the movie’s 88 minutes!
When was the last time you saw a 40-minute scene in a movie? And when was there ever a scene that long that did not become claustrophobic or stage-bound (with all due respect to Hitchcock’s Rope)? I bet most viewers did not even notice that it was all one scene. I don’t know which directors in movie history could pull this off, but I am quite sure no one else alive can.
The truth is that Cuaron has mastered a long-take, slow-cutting, choreographic style that absorbs even lightning-fast action into a smooth, fluid, almost serene rhythm—which is just the effect that he needs to make this movie what it really is: an intimate, simple morality tale.
You see, that first 40 minutes concludes with Sandra Bullock, finally safe inside the womb-like confines of a space station, stripping off the protective shell of her spacesuit, floating back, and finally (in weightless super-slow motion) curling into a fetal position—and Cuaron holds that evocative image for long seconds as the scene finally ends.
Up to this point, the Bullock character has immersed herself in her science to escape from a life too traumatic to endure: she has lost her only daughter. Unable to bear the heavy pain of her of life on earth, she chooses the remote weightlessness of the heavens.
The second half of the movie depicts her recovery. Facing near certain death, she retreats to her high-tech womb, incubates a new will to live, and is reborn.
A major irony is that a movie called Gravity has only one shot where the characters are not weightless--the last shot! Of course, it is the earth-ward pull of gravity that matches the outward thrust of the space stations and keeps them in orbit--and the threatening, violent action results when one satellite’s orbit fails. But this tension of gravity and inertia is only visible, ironically, in the weightless floating of the characters.
The film’s visible gravity is not physical at all, so much as it is mortal and moral. There is the grave mortal threat of the chain-reaction accident that could kill all the characters. And there is the gravely moral matter of whether Bullock believes her own life is still worth not only living for, but fighting for. The movie’s climax comes at the moment that her will to live overrides her death wish (thanks to George Clooney’s dream-like Deus ex Machina) and she devises a plan to get her life back.
It cannot be mere coincidence (this is fiction, after all; nothing happens by chance) that Bullock’s journey takes her from an American station to a Russian station to a Chinese station. Her new embrace of life has no national ring to it, her rebirth is a human triumph, not a patriotic one. Nor is it coincidence that about half the time one cannot identify what part of the earth lies below the action. The planet below is not a place of nations; it is the home of the human family. And Bullock finally decides to rejoin that family.
The final scene brings us back to earth amid cosmic images of rebirth and evolution. Bullock’s space capsule plunges into water, which then rushes in when the hatch opens. The moment is urgent: she must escape her fluid-filled womb or die.
Pushing herself out of the capsule into the water herself, she begins to sink: the suit that has kept her alive in space is lethal in water, it will drag her down. So she struggles to strip down, shedding her protective “skin” for a second time--just as a large frog swims by her up to the surface.
Like a fellow amphibian who finally needs fresh air to breathe, she struggles to the surface--and floats, not quite weightless but buoyant. She first swims and then crawls to the water’s edge, ready to emerge from water to land. And in this, the movie’s last shot, she finally feels the pull of gravity that has been missing since the opening shot--the pull that has brought her back to earth and back to life.
She nearly collapses under the new-felt, unfamiliar weight of her own body, her fists digging into the primal muck as if she were the planet’s first land-creature--as if her rebirth is the space-age rebirth of humanity.
Finally, she makes it to her feet and begins walking, unsteady, over the land. We can see the change in her body language: Now she feels the whole weight of the world on her shoulders--and now she can bear it. She has decided that, after all, she prefers the heaviness on life on earth to weightlessness in the heavens. No longer gripped by grief, she gratefully welcomes gravity.
This is an instant classic whose astonishing special effects, stunning visual beauty and masterful camerawork are all eclipsed by its lyrical (and nearly mystical) affirmation of life and the courage it takes to live it.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment