Gravity (2013)
No. 97 on my NYT 21st Century Top 100 Rewatch
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 sci-fi space thriller is often talked about for its technical brilliance, of which there is no doubt. An Academy Award winner for cinematography, editing, all three sound categories, and visual effects, the brilliance of Cuarón’s vision in collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber is a marvel, even more than a decade after its initial release and viewed from the comfort of my couch.
Underneath that surface, though, is a story that gob-smacked me in its subtle nuances 13 years after seeing this film for the first time.
We learn relatively early on that Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) lost her adolescent daughter in a freak schoolyard accident some time ago. What becomes evident as the story progresses is that Stone has just kind of been going through life’s motions ever since. “I sleep, I go to work, I drive. I just drive,” Stone says to Matt Kowalski (George Clooney).
We can quibble with whether or not someone who successfully completed a six-month training to go into space was truly adrift, but emotionally Stone has little fight left in her to the point where she nearly gives up.
It was very obviously intentional that 100 percent of this film takes place in space and with our central character. We learn so little about what’s going on down on Earth. There are no shots of Stone’s family, Houston (hi, Ed Harris), or the public reacting to this devastating space disaster. But we learn about Stone’s trauma.
The weight of the world and of life’s cruel swings can be crushing but it can also be soundless. You can drive in your car for hours with the radio on and not hear a peep coming out of that speaker. Contrasting those emotions from Stone with the silent devastation surrounding her — in space, no one can hear you scream and no one can also hear an International Space Station being ripped to shreds by a field of debris — was a stroke of genius for a filmmaker who had the capacity to put that kind of effort into his script and storytelling despite all the technical challenges this film presented.
The first and only other time I had seen this film was when it first came out and I was with two buddies, one of whom had a degree in physics. I asked him afterward what he thought of all the science elements in the film and he replied “what they got right was so impressive that it made what they got wrong all the more disappointing.” It’s true that not everything that happens in this space saga is true to science. Cuarón has spoken on this, stating plainly that they bent the rules at times for the sake of the plot and the drama.
How much mileage you want to get out of nitpicking those elements will vary, but the technical mastery is difficult to quibble with. And the fact that there’s a legitimate story behind it all — subtly brilliant and nuanced — is awe-inspiring.
Cuarón has directed three of my favorite films this century in 2006’s Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth and 2018’s Roma. I think I listed all three on my reader’s ballot of the NYT Top 100 Films of the 21st Century. When I left the theater in 2013 I don’t remember feeling about this film the way I did when rewatching it today.
I’m glad I revisited.