Alfonso Cuarón (2013)
According to the Gold Derby and Awards Circuit websites, Robert Redford and Sandra Bullock are currently vying for favouritism (with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Cate Blanchett respectively) for the Best Actor and Actress Oscars next March. Redford is the only character in All Is Lost and Bullock, once George Clooney has laid down his life for hers, is in reality the only character in the last hour of Gravity. Redford is alone at sea, Bullock in outer space (although, when she eventually makes it back to Earth and lands in the ocean, she briefly encroaches on Redford’s territory too). All Is Lost won’t be released in the UK until Boxing Day but its lone-star-against-the-elements attractions are obvious enough. There’s a nostalgic aspect to these attractions and, in the case of Bullock’s one-woman show in Gravity, a peculiarly modern quality too. Redford and Bullock are unquestionably stars – actors whose presence can carry a movie and whom an audience can both admire for their glamour and root for as people. (In Redford’s case, the latter quality may owe more to affection for some of the pictures he’s appeared in than to his screen personality but the effect is the same.) Playing these roles has clearly been a physically and perhaps a psychologically arduous experience – that also is part of the appeal of the movies and a reason for the praise that Redford and Bullock are receiving. Their acting is of course unignorable: the people they’re playing are in extremis throughout, and uninterrupted by either other characters or subplots (and the events in Gravity – if I understood them right – happen in something pretty close to real time). It’s almost comforting to be reminded what star power can do: just as the character that Bullock is playing – Dr Ryan Stone, a medical engineer on her first space mission – survives against huge odds so the actress’s human qualities rise above the CGI wizardry of Alfonso Cuarón’s movie. At the same time, that wizardry creates a distinctive look and many remarkable images, photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, and these too are an essential part of Gravity‘s success.
While Ryan Stone is a space debutante, Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (Clooney), the commander of her team, is planning to retire after this expedition. A veteran within touching distance of a relatively secure retirement after years in a dangerous occupation is a surefire recipe for something to go wrong and in Gravity it quickly does. During a space walk to service the Hubble telescope, Kowalski and Stone are warned by mission control in Houston (the voice of Ed Harris, although I’d never have recognised it) of the danger of a cloud of space debris, the result of a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite. (The resilience of Cold War tensions in space is almost nostalgic too.) The debris strikes the shuttle ‘Explorer’ and Stone is detached from it and tumbles through space. Kowalski recovers Stone and gets her back to the shuttle but it’s irreparably damaged and the rest of the crew have perished. For me, anything to do with space travel or exploration, either fiction or fact, is purgatory. During its first half hour, Gravity might as well have been a radio play with sci-fi visual aids – except they weren’t aids: I couldn’t make any connection between sight and sound. After further crises, Kowalski detaches himself from equipment to which he’s managed to attach Stone: this will be the end of him but will allow her (I think) to be pulled back towards a space station. I was sorry to see George Clooney disappear into space but glad when Sandra Bullock was back inside the station because she could take off her space suit and astronaut’s helmet and you could see her, and start enjoying her humour. As far back as her Miss Congeniality movies, Bullock was playing someone comically resourceful; Ryan Stone is a natural extension of that persona – although her mournful quality (focused on the loss of her young daughter) is, as far as I know, a new departure for Bullock. I was also glad when Stone got back to Earth – her standing up and coming uncertainly out of the sea and onto dry land makes for a fine closing sequence, although I won’t deny that I liked it all the more because it obviously was the end of the movie.
Matt Kowalski reappears and Gravity, which Alfonso Cuarón co-wrote with his son Jonas, is particularly clever at this point. Sandra Bullock is a star survivor but George Clooney’s demise is a shocking violation of the expectations of an audience watching a survival thriller. When Clooney returns, Cuarón gives the audience the pleasure of thinking he’s miraculously all right after all – and actually enjoying the Clooney grin and the character’s cocksure humour. Kowalski’s reappearance turns out to be only a dream but it’s enough, after she’s seemed to be drifting sadly towards death, to seem to give Ryan Stone renewed heart. The effect was invigorating for this viewer, too. The sophistication of Gravity‘s visual effects I take as read in a $100m movie and I wouldn’t be able to tell if there was anything especially special or indeed wrong with these. The frequent, deafening crescendos of Steven Price’s self-important music got on my nerves. And I’m glad I saw the movie in 2D: I’m sure the 3D effects are amazing for those who can appreciate them but I didn’t want darkened images to add to the difficulty of understanding what was going on. I do understand why Gravity is such a hit and it runs a trim 91 minutes but I still needed George Clooney’s brief comeback to help me through.
14 November 2013
