GRAVITY: In Space No One Can Hear You Win Seven Oscars

Real women don't let go.  Take that, Frozen.

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Writer: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Runtime: 91 mins.
2013

Here's the breakdown:

12 Years a Slave: 3.  Dallas Buyer's Club: 3.  Frozen: 2.  The Great Gatsby: 2.  Her: 1.  Philomena: 0.  Nebraska: 0.  Captain Phillips: 0.  The Wolf of Wall Street: 0.  American Hustle: 0.

Gravity: 7.

Seven Oscars.  That kind of success is remarkable.  Not to mention that it is absolutely unprecedented for a sci-fi film.  The question of Can Gravity win? has been satisfactorily answered.  The question that remains is Did Gravity deserve to win?  After that is answered, an even more savory question lingers: Why, after 86 years, did the Academy open their arms to a sci-fi film?  These are the questions I'm looking to address.

I like the Oscars.  Awards season is fun, sometimes exhilarating, and it gives a lot of excellent films more exposure than they could have otherwise found.  It's also pernicious and damaging in all sorts of ways, as enumerated in this excellent article about how American Hustle will be destroyed by winning Best Picture (thankfully, this did not come to pass).  The Oscars taint public opinion of films by pitting them against other films that often have no proper common ground for comparison other than the year in which they were released.  Asking whether Gravity is better than Philomena is sort of like asking whether peanut butter is better than horses.

(I don't mean peanut butter as a metaphor for Gravity, although horses might be a pretty decent metaphor for Philomena.)

You decide.

Instead of playing that game, I want to illustrate my thoughts about Gravity by drawing comparisons to films that do have a common ground with what Gravity is trying to accomplish.  But let me first introduce the main (and only) critique of Gravity I have heard:

It was fun to watch--the special effects were amazing--but the plot and dialogue weren't that great.

Curiously, I have heard this complaint almost exclusively from casual movie-watchers.  Very few of the critics I've read, as evidenced by the impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, have voiced similar issues.  I am not arguing that the critics are always right (I actually think most of them are terrible and don't understand the basics of storytelling).  Rather, I'm presenting another puzzle: It's strange for a sci-fi movie, normally a very populist genre, to have critics heaping stronger praise upon it than regular ol' viewing audiences.

So what's the deal?  Why aren't critics acknowledging the admittedly clunky dialogue?  Why isn't the simplistic plot a dealbreaker, or at least causing hesitation?  Shouldn't the Academy have picked up on such an obvious critique and parceled out some awards to the copious movies released last year with tighter dialogue and more complex plots?  Were they blinded by the pretty special effects that were built from the ground up over the course of half a decade?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that to do a film justice, we must approach it on its own terms.  I don't mean that we should see a movie as it sees itself.  I mean that instead of bringing preconceived notions to the theater about "what makes movies good", we need to recognize what kind of story each individual movie is trying to tell, how it goes about telling that story, and whether those mechanisms function effectively or ineffectually.

I was recently reading a blog post that highlights an obvious example of an inability to approach a work of art on its own terms.  Check out the article here.  You can see how the critic in question is doing absolutely nobody, not even herself, any justice when she projects her desires, stereotypes, and assumptions upon others.  It's damaging, and I'm arguing that something similar is happening with the reception of Gravity, except on a much subtler plane.

We have this tacit assumption that there is some a priori checklist of qualities that a film needs to have to be good.  Good acting, good directing, good cinematography, good plot, good dialogue, etc.  Sometimes people even have personalized versions of this list: "A good editor can make up for clunky direction," or whatever.  I believe this is what is happening when people talk about Gravity as lacking because of its plot and dialogue--two key items on the checklist.  It's totally understandable too, because most of the time they would be right.  Nearly all conventional films rely on plot and dialogue to tell their story.  I don't think, however, that Gravity is a conventional film in this sense.  Basically, I don't think Gravity pays much attention to its plot and dialogue because it knows it would only distract from the story it is really trying to tell, a story that is almost entirely sensory.  Gravity's plot and dialogue need to be sparse and simplistic so that the focus lands with full force on the visuals and the audio, because those are the mechanisms that make the story function.

This idea that plot and dialogue are somehow not always important may sound pretty abstract, so let's take a tour of examples.  Think about movies like Fantasia, or all those rock opera films like The Who's Quadrophenia, or that funny little Swedish film I found on Netflix called Sound of Noise about a tone deaf policeman investigating a band of renegade percussionists.  These films opt out of a lot of conventional narrative structures involving plot and dialogue, and instead focus on the experiential.  Nobody complains that Fantasia's plot doesn't make any sense, but nobody argues that it isn't telling one coherent story either.  Note that these first examples are experimental hybrids of music and film.  While Gravity is obviously not that, I think it shares more in common with a symphonic structure than it shares with a typical action movie or romcom or dramatic plot structure.  Not that I know anything about music.

A non-musical example I turn to in thinking about this is the recent sci-fi film Upstream Color, Shane Carruth's follow-up to his breakthrough film Primer.  Check this movie out if you get the chance, and pay attention to the way the dialogue does not drive the plot forward, but rather acts as a sort of atmospheric backdrop to the events of the movie.  It adds texture, whereas the visuals are the main driving force of the narrative.  This is a fascinating reversal of the dynamic we're used to, where the visuals enhance or add texture to the progression and information we glean from dialogue and plot events.

For a more prominent example, think about 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kubrick's opus (at least, one of his opuses) has no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie, nor in the last 23.  I dare you to remember a piece of dialogue that wasn't spoken by or to HAL 9000.  I can't.  But I can enumerate tens of images and aural moments that have been grafted into my memory.  We don't remember what astronaut X said about mechanism Q.  We remember the haunting majesty of the obelisk; the unblinking red eye of HAL; the psychedelic nonsense of the portal; the nightmarish comfort of the white room; the tranquil menace of the star child.  2001 is a visual story.

I actually think 2001 is the best movie to compare to Gravity, because despite their immense differences, I believe they're doing similar things.  Whereas 2001 masters the art of telling its story through existentially abstract visuals, Gravity tells its story through a sort of visual hyperrealism that nods to abstraction in its structure.  I gave a laundry list of 2001's great story moments, so here are a few of Gravity's.

We see an important tool floating away from Ryan's (Sandra Bullock, who absolutely kills her role despite acting by herself in a box) grasp, just as Matt (George Clooney, who absolutely is the same as ever despite acting by himself in a box) instructed her earlier not to let happen; we see an entire spaceship ripped to shrapnel by other shrapnel in total silence, as we're left to ponder the delicacy of man and the beauty of chaos; we see a speck of a human surrounded by void; we see a woman enter a safe area and shed her space suit cocoon, curling into a floating fetal position; we see her face distorted through the lens of a single teardrop, floating and spherical; we see a fall, a baptism, a rebirth, etc. etc.

None of these moments exist in a void.  Each of them are directly tied to powerful themes, or visual motifs that were ingeniously set up earlier in the film.  We see a woman's character arc in the movement of her body--how the elements beat her down, and how she decides to regain control.  We don't need dialogue to see this story.  The dialogue offers texture, punctuation.  The characters are talking because astronauts talk to each other, not because they need to advance the plot.

This isn't a movie like Transformers where you can say, "The plot might fall flat, but at least the special effects were good."  Gravity doesn't just have good special effects layered on top; Gravity is the special effects.  That's where you find the story, and that's why the movie is so relentlessly visceral.  Watching Gravity feels like so much more than watching footage of space because it is so much more--it makes that footage into a story about the resilience of mankind and the majesty of the universe (which is what documentaries about space try to do anyway, just in a less effective way).

Did Gravity deserve to win what it won?  I believe it did.  Why was it allowed to do so by the Academy?  I think after watching it many critics remembered something that is actually pretty easy to forget about film: It's a visual medium.  When many people saw Gravity, they experienced the truth of that.  Gravity takes the visceral excitement of summer popcorn movies, and through precise craftsmanship combines that excitement with a quasi-religious avant garde experience that could not have been captured by any other medium.  Gravity is a film's film, and just as Sandra Bullock's character is reborn through the chaos, Gravity rekindled a sense of childhood wonder in us that reminds us of the amazing things that film, and humanity, can achieve.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS

P.S.  For this blog post, I owe a tremendous debt to FILM CRIT HULK once again, who also wrote an article about Gravity that I read around the time the movie came out, and is much more insightful than mine.  I deliberately did not reread his article until after I wrote this one, but I internalized enough of it that I still owe him a serious shout-out.