CINEMANIA:

Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, USA, 2013)

Dan, when I badgered you to tell me your Oscar picks so I could pick the same picks, I had not yet seen Gravity. You may recall that after you selecting Gravity for all the technical awards, I went back and reversed your bet on it for best director - having already devoted best picture to 12 Years A Slave - to go with American Hustle. Wrong! Even though I still reckon David O. Russell is THE darling of Hollywood right now, Gravity will take the best director Oscar, and might even take the best picture prize as well.

I propose that Gravity should be assessed according to at least three categories. The first is imagery. It is extremely rare that I see a film in a theatre on a huge screen, never mind IMAX and/or 3D. And it is just about as infrequently after watching a movie at home on my very modest box that I wish I had looked at it large. I am a pretentious ideas man, eh? But this time I truly regret not having witnessed Gravity as big as possible. Let me just sign on for the obvious. The visual experience is stunning. I am sure the technical work to produce Gravity will be an industry standard for some time. Quite an amazing achievement.

Personally, I would have been blown away just to be in near outer-space, just floating around, nothing much happening, a sort of planetarium show. But Gravity boasts no shortage of action with things blowing up real good. These exciting explosions are not caused by weapons of mass destruction but rather by an accident involving technology deployed for peaceful scientific research. This is essential for its appeal as a universal human condition story, my third category for assessing Gravity. Prior to this, though, the mid-level human factor is the drama.

Evaluated in this second category, Gravity is fundamentally a suspense program. Clearly, there are not a lot of people involved. It comes down to the solitary person in the physical world. The challenge for the protagonist is as basic as basic can be. She is struggling with matter itself - or perhaps more precisely, the lack of it - and the struggle is life-and-death for her. In other words, Gravity is a tale of individual survival.

I found it to be very suspenseful, maybe a bit too much. The plot provides quite a few obstacles for the woman to overcome at a pretty furious pace. I could have used a few less at a slower tempo, which is to say less spectacular action and more existential thought-process. (See: "I'm a pretentious ideas man" and "I would have been blown away just floating around," above.) That said, the dramatic power of the outer-space context is of itself enough to make the suspense meaningful.

For Dr. Ryan Stone is Everyman up there. Which brings me to category three. Gravity is a suspense cookie thoroughly dunked in moral milk. The heroine is symbolically and also quite literally operating on the furthest frontier of civilization and represents the circumstance of humanity as such.

This is superficially signaled by the cooperative internationalism of the outposts of mankind in the highest sky, (although the Russian error behind the accident could be interpreted as a residual Cold War tweak).

As well, this time out, Everyman is Everywoman. (There are strong indicators that might tilt against this ostensible feminism, however. She is teased for having a man's name. Her psychology is that of a Madonna whose maternal instinct is so damaged, she has improperly inverted herself into an over-excellent masculine type. She is geared to dominating nature instead of communing with it as she should, unlike the Romantic poet in an astronautic suit, Matt Kowalski.)

But I digress. For the main issue is all of our grand gadgetry and what good it does not do us unless we possess the right stuff. The right stuff inside. Gravity is about having the moral bearings required for survival.

As I happen to be reading Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope right now, let me surprise you by saying that Gravity is not religious enough. Survival? Is that the most we can hope for today? Just to survive, not to thrive? Is there no aspect of progressive aspiration in the fiction of our science fiction? Is this the biggest dream we can dream these days? Is the nihilist despair so far gone?

Compare Gravity to a mainstream hit from a few decades ago, full of fantasy about advancing to the next stage, featuring a fanatical hero, a pioneer of mystical passion, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Certainly, Gravity is life-affirming, sincerely grateful for The Earth, deeply glad of the gravity of Gaia. I do not mean to trivialize the ethical import of this. Yet, the lack of faith in our anthropological adventure is for me just as pronounced in the film.

Which is now to say in reverse that Gravity is too religious. Monica - who refers to herself as a recovering Catholic - disagrees with me about this. But come on, it is plainly there in the script. I will allow that I have to read between the lines to take Clooney's character as Christ-like, a dude at One with everything who dies for the sins of Bullock's character. And it may or may not be a stretch to apprehend her sinfulness as a suicidal tendency barely kept in check by workaholic over-achievement, itself a cover for the prioritization of personal grief. However sympathetically understandable, this is still a form of selfish pride antithetical to thanking the Lord.

Challenge all of that if you will. But it is undeniable that while attempting to give in to death, she has a CO2 induced vision that entails her conversion. She is born again. The immediate confirmation of this is her explicit announcement of her new-found belief in Heaven. Whereas she had previously told us that she does not have it in her to pray, she is now certain that Kowalski and her four year-old daughter are playing shuffleboard for all of eternity, without keeping score of course. Wonder if Kurt Vonnegut and Wanda June are pushing pucks up there too.

If Gravity wins best film and/or best director and 12 Years A Slave wins neither, I figure it will be reasonable to regard this as an escape from the past that is simultaneously a flight to no future.