Gravity

Beyond its breathtaking images and extraordinary special effects, Gravity is a film about adversity, isolation, and perhaps our most elemental fear: dying alone. Alfonso Cuarón strips these enormous subjects down to the simplest of narratives—a human being struggling to survive. Since Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, filmmakers have looked to the stars as a place of fantasy, possibility, and fear. What better setting for a story about the will to live than outer space, where there is literally no one to save you?

At the center of Gravity is a deceptively simple question: What makes us keep going when there seems to be no reason to do so? Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is not simply fighting the physical forces that threaten to kill her. Long before she is stranded in space, part of her has already withdrawn from life. Her journey is therefore not only about survival but about choosing to live. In the weightlessness of space, she can continue drifting, or she can find a reason to return.

Cuarón explores these ideas visually rather than rhetorically, through some of the most beautiful and elegant filmmaking I have seen on the big screen in a long time. Even the title carries multiple meanings. Gravity is weight, seriousness, and the force that holds us to the Earth; “grave” evokes both solemnity and death. The film takes place in a world defined by weightlessness, yet its subjects could hardly be weightier. That tension runs throughout the film.

What is particularly impressive is that Cuarón never allows the technology to become the subject. The technical achievement is extraordinary, but the technology serves the story rather than the other way around. The long, fluid takes—reminiscent of the extended shots Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki used in Children of Men—allow us to experience something of the disorientation of weightlessness. Camera, actors, and music seem to move together in a world without a stable up or down. The result has the fluidity of dance: everything appears effortless, concealing the enormous amount of work required to create that illusion.

Yet for all the attention paid to the film’s technology, scale, and spectacular vistas, Gravity is ultimately more concerned with an interior landscape than an exterior one. Much of the film’s emotional force resides in Ryan’s face and voice. At moments, the images of her face framed through the helmet visor recall the expressive close-ups of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, or even Chaplin’s face in the final moments of The Tramp. The surrounding spectacle falls away, and a human face becomes the landscape that matters.

Cuarón deepens that intimacy through his shifting use of point of view. At one moment, we are outside Ryan and Kowalski, watching tiny human figures struggle against the vastness of space. Almost imperceptibly, the camera moves toward Ryan until we find ourselves inside her helmet, looking through her visor and seeing what she sees. We move from observing her experience to inhabiting it. The distance between character and viewer collapses. We see, feel, and almost breathe through Ryan. She becomes us.

Bullock’s performance gives that identification its emotional force. Her transformation is expressed not only through dialogue but through the physical imagery of the film. One of its most striking images shows Ryan floating in a fetal position, suspended in a womblike space. From there, the film increasingly takes on the imagery of birth and rebirth. She twists and pulls herself through the narrow, almost umbilical corridors of the spacecraft before finally returning to Earth and emerging from the water.

The imagery is unmistakably primordial. Ryan crawls from the water like some distant ancestor making its first movement onto land, gasping for air like a newborn before struggling to stand. After an entire film spent in weightlessness, those first unsteady steps give new meaning to the word gravity. The force that has been absent throughout the film suddenly becomes precious. Gravity is no longer merely something that weighs us down; it is what connects us to the Earth.

And perhaps that is the film’s deepest metaphor. We take gravity for granted because it is always there, just as we so easily take life itself for granted. Only after Ryan has come so close to losing both does she experience their value.

Adversity can become a kind of crossroads. We can surrender to it, allowing some part of ourselves to die, or we can emerge from it changed. Ryan begins Gravity already drifting, emotionally as well as physically. Her struggle is ultimately not simply to return to Earth but to return to life.

For 91 minutes—and for considerably longer after the film is over—Gravity asks us to consider the fears we spend so much of our lives trying not to confront: isolation, loss, mortality, and the possibility that there may come a moment when no one else can save us. Ryan’s answer is finally very simple. She stands up.