With Great Gravity

Last night I drove 150 miles to take to the nearest large screen movie house to see Gravity in 3D.  That’s one of the realities of living on the west coast of Ireland, but when the film ended we sat in silence for a moment, wowed, amazed, thrilled and moved.   It was well worth the journey.

This film works on so many levels.   We have all heard about its technical innovation and achievement.   It is a thrilling ride through space, and space seen in ways we have never seen it before, even on NASA footage. The co-producer, co-writer and Director Alfonso Cauron and the cinematographer  Emmanuel Lubezski have  worked together on six films, including The Children of Men.   Making that film they devised new rigs and employed leading edge technology to great effect, and for Gravity they have found entirely convincing ways to persuade us that we are floating in space.  

Lubezski has also worked with  Michael Mann (Ali) Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow) Terrence Malik (The Tree of Life and To the Wonder) plus the Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese, all of them demanding films, but Gravity must the most demanding project he has ever worked on.   When Sandra Bullock’s character Dr Ryan Stone is  spinning out of control as disaster strikes the Space Shuttle she is working outside, we first of all see her spinning against the backdrop of earth and space, then we enter her helmet as space spins around her.  

As my friend Paul emailed me afterwards  one of the technical aspects that left me in total awe was how utterly seamlessly the 3-D was maintained across shot-transitions.  It’s easy to see how mismatched perceptual planes could have been really jarring, and utterly destroyed the “You are there” sense of total immediacy…but somehow, miraculously, the perceptual-continuity illusion was maintained quite seamlessly throughout.

This  is one of the few science fiction films that takes the Alien tag line In space no one can hear you scream seriously.  The only sounds we hear are from within the suit.   The disaster that drives the plot is soundless, as hundreds of pieces of debris from recently destroyed space satellites rip the shuttle apart.   My only regret is that the overblown music tries to tell us what we should be feeling.  Inferior films sometimes need this, but here the script, acting and moving images do all the work necessary.   I understand that the trailer used Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel,   and I wish they had stayed with that minimalist style - if any music is really needed.  I would like to watch the whole thing in silence, and doubt if much would be lost. 

Space must be the most hazardous environment we can enter and surely no one goes there without first coming to terms that they may not return.  So this film is about life and death, loss and hope and there are  gentle and often subtle spiritual undercurrents running through it.

I am not going to talk about the plot, which is simple and direct.   This film relies on amazing and innovative cinematic techniques and rock solid performances.    It seems that Sandra Bullock was sixth in line for the lead.  I will not identify the first five, Google will tell you if you really want to know, but we are sixth time lucky here.     I was disgruntled when Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for The Blind Side.   I thought her performance was utterly competent, but in no way spectacular.   I think The Blind Side was the kind of self congratulatory US movie that encourages its audience to ignore the systemic problems of its society by concentrating on individual stories of good luck or compassion.    For me the real ‘blind side performance’  that year was Gabourey Sidibe’s in Precious.   But I devoutly hope that Ms Bullock will be suitably rewarded for the sheer physical hard work and extra-ordinary discomfort she endured to bring her character’s dilemma to life.  Any human being who is paid to go into space has to be remarkable.   They need to be physically tough, very clever and emotionally stable and utterly courageous.  Sandra Bullock persuades us she is all of these, and her character is also vulnerable.   Dr Stone is not Super Woman, but she is a super woman.   

George Clooney is her supporting actor, and well chosen.   His gentle humour and our awareness of his charm are worked to great advantage here.   Ed Harris is the voice of Mission Control from Houston, on the ground instead of in Apollo 13, there is also a sly reference to Alien and a delightful one to WALL-E, but this film does not rely on SF movie references.

As you see, I am not going into details about this film.  To do so would spoil your experience of watching this film, and I do encourage you to do so.  My 150 mile round trip  was well worth if to see Gravity  as if should be seen, in 3D on a big wide screen - and IMAX if you are lucky enough to have one in reach.    Go for it.  

Gerard Depardieu is Cyrano de Bergerac

The original play was written in 1897 by the Frenchman Edmund Rostand.   There was a real 17^th century man of  name, but the play is a broad fictionalization of his life.

Rostard wrote his play in verse,  and it has been translated and performed many times,  introducing the word ‘panache’ into the English language.  The English writer (and polymath) Anthony Burgess wrote a new verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1970,  performed in Minneapolis in 1973  and ten years later in a Royal Shakespeare production.   Burgess also wrote a musical adaptation starring Christopher Plummer on  Broadway.

For the 1990 film, starring Gerald Depardieu,  Burgess’s translation, written in rhyming couplets,  was used as the English sub-titles.   Depardieu won an Oscar for his performance (plus many other awards.)

There had been a  highly acclaimed English language film starring Jose Ferrer in 1950, and in 1959 a Japanese samurai version, The Life of an Expert Swordsman, was made starring Toshiro Mifune.   In 1987 film Steve Martin made a successful contemporary comedy version, starring Daryl Hannah  as Roxanne.  

Some modern literary critics have wondered if, as Rostand was gay,  he used his own experience of being socially unacceptable in this play, Cyrano’s nose being a metaphor.

In 1991 the great film critic Roger Ebert wrote; It is entirely appropriate that Cyrano - whose very name evokes the notion of grand romantic gestures - should have lived his life bereft of romance. What is romanticism, after all, but a bold cry about how life should be, not about how it is? And so here is Cyrano de Bergerac, hulking, pudding-faced, with a nose so large he is convinced everyone is laughing at him - yet he dares to love the fair Roxane.  

The "real" Cyrano, if there was such a creature beneath the many layers of myth that have grown up around the name, lived in France from 1619 to 1655, and wrote stories about his magnificent voyages to the moon and the sun. He inspired the Cyrano we love, a more modern creation and now here is a magnificently lusty, brawling, passionate and tempestuous classical version, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.

You would not think he would be right for the role. Shouldn't Cyrano be smaller, more tentative, more pathetic - instead of this outsized, physically confident man of action?  

Depardieu is often said to be "wrong" for his roles. His physical presence makes a definite statement on the screen, and then his acting genius goes to work, and transforms him into whatever is required for the role - into a spiritual priest, a hunchbacked peasant, a medieval warrior, a car salesman, a businessman, a sculptor, a gangster.

Here he plays Cyrano, gadfly and rabble-rouser, man about town, friend of some, envied by many, despised by a powerful few, and hopelessly, oh, most painfully and endearingly, in love with Roxane.   

But his nose is too large.   When he looks in the mirror he knows it would be an affront to present the nose anywhere in the vicinity of the fair Roxane with an amorous purpose attached to it.

Now here is the inoffensive clod Christian.   For him, love is a fancy. For Cyrano, a passion. Yet if Cyrano cannot have Roxane, then he will help his friend, and so he ghostwrites letters and ghost-recites speeches in the moonlight, and because Roxane senses that the words come from a heart brave and true, she pledges herself to Christian. The irony - which only the audience can fully appreciate - is that anyone with a heart so pure that she could love a cheesy lump like Christian because of his language could certainly love a magnificent man like Cyrano for the same reason, and regardless of his nose.

If you don't know the brilliance of the late Roger Ebert, his website is still being run and the archive is lodged there, full of gems.    Ebert was a dedicated, informed, deeply literate critic, and usually generous.   His ire, however, was best avoided.

Michael Bay's movie 'Pearl Harbor' was described by Mr Ebert as 'a two hour film squeezed into three hours, about how, on December 7th 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.'   If you want to read even crueler, though not necessarily sharper, 'hatchet jobs' go to Mark Kermode's book of that name. 

Darkness Implacable

Marlow Meets Conrad in Scott & McCarthy’s The Counselor

A counselor/lawyer wants to make a lot of money very quickly, and maybe some of his criminal clients can help.    He invests in a drug smuggling venture across the Tex/Mex border, but it goes badly wrong.   That is all the plot you need to know, because the plot is entirely secondary in this film.  The motor that drives this story is moral logic, not narrative, and once it starts ticking it will not stop until it reaches its deadly climax.    We are told this early on in the film, but do we recognize the anecdote’s significance?   We are given no back-story or narrative exposition, so we have to pay close attention and gather any possible clues or signposts not knowing if they are part of the machinery.  Anton Chekhov once advised a young playwright  "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act".    There is an armoury full of narrative pistols here,  and we do not know which are loaded with blanks and which with nickel-plated bullets.   But we find out.

One character knowingly misquotes from Kit Marlow’s Jew of Malta: That was in another country;  and besides the wench is dead.     If we connect with the original quote these words they will reverberate chillingly later.   Marlow also wrote ‘There is a point, to which when men aspire, they tumble headlong down.  (Edward II) and ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ (Dr Faustus).   And that is also a good plot summary .   

McCarthy once wrote “I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.” It seems some critics think he has written a stupid script here, and that Scott has filmed it with equal inanity. Well most of them didn't like Blade Runner either.   McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, is about drugs and greed and consequences.  So is  The Counselor,  but McCarthy wasn't going to write about them in the same way twice.  

McCarthy may be the Josef Conrad of our time.    Like Conrad he looks into the heart of darkness.  He knows the deadly seduction of greed.  He recognizes the banality of evil, and he knows that banality should not reduce the terror.  The Counselor, like Verloc in Conrad’s Secret Agent, thinks he can work with evil, profit from it – and survive.   And consider these words;

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”   

Is it Conrad or McCarthy?   In fact they come from McCarthy’s The Road, but they could be in The Heart of Darkness.   McCarthy has also written

“These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.   (Blood Meridian).  

“Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.” And

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”    (Both from All the Pretty Horses). 

These themes run like obsidian threads through most of McCarthy’s work.  The themes may be constant, but he is always looking for new ways to plait them and he will not give us what we expect.  

One critic actually called this film  a crime caper.  You will not understand how wide of the mark that is until you see the film.   Some reviewers excuse McCarthy  by saying that ‘he has never written a film script before and so it is understandable that doesn’t really know how to do it’.    But this is a McCarthy script so it will not be like other scripts.   The Road was not like any other post-apocalyptic novel or film, and No Country for Old Men was also distinctive.   What we remember about that film is the implacable evil embodied in Chugar, as played by Javier Bardem.   Bardem is cast here again,  but his character is absolutely not Chugar, and the evil gravity sucking the plot and the Counselor inexorably downwards does not lie within him.  The faceless cartel is the black hole.   No light escapes its pull.   At the end of No County a lawman is defeated, not physically, but morally.  He can no longer face the darkness.  In this film another lawman, the lawyer rather than a sheriff,  is also defeated by the dark powers, but he is a more willing victim.

So here we have Ridley Scott directing a Cormac McCarthy original script, with Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem  and Brad Pitt.   The expectations are high and the critics are widely divided.   Many of them are deeply disappointed.    Yet others are exhilarated by this film’s refusal to play the standard narrative beats, to wink at us, keep letting us in on the plot, to give us a hero. We are given no release from the inexorable, implacable, pitiless consequences and when the violence comes it is extreme and utterly thrill free.  

None of the actors try to win us over.   Fassbender’s Counselor is smart and greedy and stupid. He will not listen to the people who know what they are talking about.    He is vain enough to think they are his friends.  His only redeeming quality is his new found love, Laura, but the quality of that love is only discovered too late.   Bardem’s character is  blinded by his success (and maybe his shirt) and fascinated by the feline beauty and power of his girlfriend, in which role Cameron Diaz does something new – and I do not mean the notorious ‘sex with a Ferrari wind-screen’  scene.   No; in this film Diaz is frightening, and I have not seen that before.     Brad Pitt dons his Thelma & Louise Stetson but puts aside his charm.  He is smart, but not the smartest.     Penelope Cruz, as Laura has the least to do, because she is the film’s only innocent, but her beauty alone is enough to justify the crucial role her existence plays in the film.    

Major and minor characters spout cod philosophy about life and death and crime and punishment, and it is cod philosophy because they are not philosophers.  McCarthy is, but his message is not spoken here, it is shown.   He has always loved using words and images, writing for the stage and screen as well as novels.    Some think his vision is nihilistic, bleak and hopeless, nd of course The Road and No Country  reinforce that opinion.  But maybe his humanity is that of the surgeon who has to cut deep into our bowels to reveal the cancer.   If we deny its existence it will kill us.   And sometimes it does.  We must never ignore that possibility.  But we have to find ways to live with this knowledge.

Do not be misled by the marketing.  This is not a crime caper or a thriller.    I think this is a fine film, wonderfully written, filmed and performed.  It compliments us by asking us to do some work, and it does so with serious intent.  Ridley Scott is a serious artist, and so is Cormac McCarthy.    I cannot wait to see it again, to pick up what I missed the first time round.