Film Analysis: “Gravity”

Stone follows Kowalski’s instructions and detaches, ultimately floating uncontrollably into blackness. The beauty of Alfonso Cuaron’s symbolic images surprises me with each subsequent viewing. She floats uncontrollably because she is not in control of her life. Kowalski on the other hand is complete control. He comes to her rescue and drags her back to the scene.

The metaphorical journey continues as they voyage to another space station. Kowalski asks about Stone’s past and if there’s anyone back home looking up at the sky, wondering when she’ll return, and we finally understand why she seems to have given up on life. No one is waiting for her.

We learn that she used to have a daughter but lost her in a playground accident. “All I do is work, and when I get home, I just drive. I was driving when I got the call, so ever since, that’s what I do. I drive.” One can’t help but feel sorry for her. The viewer misjudged her. It’s sad how we judge people not knowing what they’ve been through and how they came to be where they are now, but now we understand when and why she gave up on living.

We get the feeling that she has been grieving ever since. Coping with grief is the most painful of all human emotions, but it’s something we all eventually go through. For how long one gets stuck in sorrow depends on the gravity of the situation (no pun intended). Grief comes in many forms, be it divorce, or the loss of a friend you once held dear. Stone is going through the worst kind of grief, the death of a loved one.

Some people never emerge out of this state of mind; they linger in it and make it their home in what ends up being a very depressing life. It makes perfect sense, why she’s been stuck in this state for so long. When we unexpectedly lose someone, it is instantaneous but long lingering. It’s just how we naturally process the emotion. You don’t lose the person in one shot, you lose the person in small painful doses over time- when she goes to bed and stops hearing the cries of her baby, when her child’s scent starts to fade awayher clothes, when memories haunt heras she drives. It’s not easy to let go of things right away, but eventually it all comes down to whether you’ll mourn the rest of your days or learn to let go and move forward.

The first time Kowalski saved Stone’s life was earlier, when he told her to detach. The second time is in another post impact scene that mirrors the first. Only this time, the roles are reversed. He’s the one about to drift into infinite blackness. We see that he’s dragging her with him and the only chance for any of them to survive is if he cuts off the rope. In other words, Kowalski saves her life again through detachment. It’s not by preventing her to float with him into space, but by teaching her that sometimes it’s ok to let go, both literally and metaphorically. “You have to learn to let go,” he says. It’s a beautiful scene.

This is the turning point of our main character’s psychological journey. Stone works her way into a spacecraft and takes off her suit in a hurry. As she floats inside in her bare skin, her posture resembles that of an unborn baby floating in a womb. Stone is reborn. She may not know it yet, but she is about to start a new life. When she fails to get a spacecraft to start up again, she almost gives up again. We see her crying as she communicates with “another world.” We hear the voice of a baby. Stone lets it all out; she laughs, cries and howls like it’s in human beings’ primitive nature to do so.

In the following scene, just as she’s about to accept the fact that she’ll be stuck in this state forever, we see the return of Kowalski. It is clearly a vision and Kowalski is merely her mind pushing her to do what he tried to teach her when sacrificing his life for hers. “What’s the point of going on? What’s the point of living? Your kid died. It doesn’t get any rougher than that. It’s still a matter of what you do now. If you decide to go, than you got to just get on with it. Sit back. Enjoy the ride. You got to plant both your feet on the ground and start living life.”

Eventually she decides to fight for it. She guides herself through Kowalski. Her subconscious mind digs deep into her memory of what she learnt in boot camp. She gets the thing working and as she shoots towards earth she faces her final step.  “You’ll see a little girl, with brown hair, lots of knots. She didn’t like to brush it. You tell her I found her red shoe. She was so worried about that red shoe. And it was under the bed the whole time.” Stone is letting go.

The film ends with Stone crashing into the ocean. She takes her suit off once again and floats back to the surface. The ocean isn’t much different from space when you think about it, it’s uninhabitable, there’s no oxygen, and we hover in what feels like almost zero gravity. Cuaron grounds his message to our world. This could very well have worked as a tale of two people trying to reach the surface, thousands of metres beneath the ocean. The truth is, it is a psychological journey that can, and eventually will, happen to all of us anywhere, on any given day.

We see her break the surface. The mise-en-scene of the whole film has a greyish feel to it. In this particular scene, the colours are vibrant and lively. The journey is over and the future is bright. Stone struggles against gravity at first, but eventually she does the very thing her subconscious self (Kowalski) previously asked for. We see a close up shot of Stone planting her feet to the ground and moving forward.