Many of Cuarón’s films deal with loss, grief, and loneliness. But “Gravity” is the most deliberate in underscoring how grief eats away at a person, pushing them to chase silence until they’re forced to reckon with what they lost. Released ten years ago this month, the film handles such a personal and intimate story with striking grandiosity.
The film’s impression was staggering in theaters, equally dizzying and emotionally destructive. Bullock’s Ryan has suffered an impossible loss in her daughter’s death, which turns what might’ve been a simple action-adventure story into one that tackles the very different types of survival and what it means to persevere in increasingly unrelenting odds. A medical engineer, she decides to embark on her first shuttle mission, teaming with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) on his last trip beyond the atmosphere before retirement. What was meant to be routine takes a dramatic turn; the shuttle is destroyed, and the two are left with no conceivable rescue. “Gravity” marries personal tragedy with looming disaster, as Ryan is forced to deal with two different types of survival.
The striking potential loneliness of being human is a thematic undercurrent in all of Cuarón’s stories. In “A Little Princess” (1995), Sara Crewe lies weeping, encircled by lines of wet chalk, believing her father has become a causality of war. Yalitza Aparicio’s Cleo suffers a traumatic stillbirth in “Roma” (2018) following a violent public event that induces her labor. In “Children of Men” (2003), a broken society is seeking answers amidst the increasing depravity of the world when the hint of new life–greater, promised futures–is suddenly stripped from them. Even “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004) touches on what could’ve been, as Harry grieves parents he never knew, with two figureheads who knew his parents well, Remus and Sirius, arriving in his life.
One of the most memorable, intrinsically linked images to his career remains in “Y tu mamá también” (2001). Maribel Verdú’s Luisa has her back to the camera, facing the sea and along against the great swarth of the ocean and a future, devastating decision. “Gravity” (2013) literalizes this. In the loneliest, most removed situation a person can imagine, adrift in the endlessness of space, Ryan is forced into a physical and cerebral reckoning of grief.
So often in movies about space, the gravity-defying platform allows a character to express or be content with emotional, existential baggage. The follies of fatherhood are investigated in films such as “Ad Astra” (2019), “Interstellar” (2014), and “First Man” (2018). “Moon” (2009) offers a platform for a man to realize his insignificant mortality. “Gravity” pivots refreshingly to motherhood and hones in on the idea that we can travel to the very ends of the universe, but we’ll always be trapped within the confines of our thoughts.