The Best Movies of 2013, #3: Gravity
“Life in space is impossible,” the opening crawl announces in Gravity. And so it is. Beyond the confines of our atmosphere, there is—as the crawl also succinctly informs us—no oxygen, no sound, no air pressure. Astronauts who brave the pitiless environment of space must take meticulous precautions just to survive; one mistake means death. It is for this reason that space is an ideal setting for a horror movie (such as one that sports perhaps the most famous tagline in all of movies). And true to form, Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning depiction of one woman’s battle against the void, is consistently terrifying, with dread pervading it at all times. It places its protagonist in certain doom and watches her scrap and claw just for the opportunity to breathe air and set foot on land. It is spare, harsh, and ruthless. Yet it is also exquisitely beautiful, astonishing viewers with its formal command and visual audacity. As a piece of storytelling, Gravity is merciless. As a work of cinema, it is rapturous.
Its magnificent, extended opening shot instantly establishes this twisted duality. Gravity takes place almost entirely in the black, inky void of space, and as Cuarón’s camera—operated by six-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Cuarón’s sublime Children of Men—glides toward a speck of an object, it immediately evokes the gargantuan, oppressive nature of the universe. Yet the camera does indeed glide, and there’s a breathtaking gentleness to its graceful swoop as it gradually homes in on that speck and reveals it to be a telescope and a pair of floating astronauts. These are Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), but the camera doesn’t settle on them; instead, it continues to rove, circling the gleaming telescope and looking back toward the stars. It’s an opening that’s equal parts horror setup and majestic opera, silently conveying the characters’ precarious situation yet also marveling at their fluid movements and their ability to exist in this cold, forbidding world. Read More
Slavery was horrible. This is not up for debate; it’s a fact. Yet our discussion of this wretched time in our civilization tends to feel removed and academic. How, we wonder, could society have countenanced the suppression of an entire race? What forces could have conspired to treat people as nothing more than property? Was nineteenth-century America motivated by economic gain, rationalizing that the ends justified the means, or did slave owners honestly believe in racial superiority? These are questions worth asking, lest such horrid history repeat itself, but they approach slavery more as an intellectual concept than as the actual, systemic brutalization of humans. 12 Years a Slave—Steve McQueen’s gripping, unapologetically savage account of one servant’s struggles—bucks that trend and instead takes a hauntingly intimate approach. It is not about slavery’s politics. It is about its mechanics.
As wonderful as it is to watch, American Hustle was assuredly a difficult film to make. It has a labyrinthine plot, replete with double crosses, false identities, fake accents, and cons nested inside other cons. Its structure is ungainly, with cascading flashbacks, multiple voiceovers, and repeated shifts in point of view. And its based-in-truth narrative, about the FBI’s ABSCAM sting in the 1970s, is laden with insider minutiae, ranging from the mechanics of organized crime to the breadth of political corruption to the egotism of law enforcement. You would think, given the need to balance all of these plates spinning on screen, that American Hustle would require a workmanlike and disciplined director, someone capable of streamlining the screenplay’s disparate elements and synthesizing its busy plot. Instead, it got David O. Russell.