In general I tend to be a member of the Sandra Bullock Skeptic club, and so after raving to everyone I know about how amazing Gravity is, I wasn’t surprised that the most common reply was “Uh huh…but Sandra Bullock though?” I want to make abundantly clear to the “Sandra Bullock though” crowd that not only is she not a weak spot in an otherwise strong movie, but she ends up being one of its most surprisingly powerful aspects. Her role puts her in the position of audience surrogate for much of the film, and she performs spectacularly to this end. It sounds stupid to say, but just her breathing is deeply affecting, and causes us, out of sheer empathetic impulse, to raise our own heart and breathing rates.
She also finds a way to balance the expertise of her character’s scientific background with the nervousness of such a person being deployed into space for the first time—another reason we sympathize with her, as fellow space newbies. But she also effectively conveys the emotional baggage she carries in addition to her occupational hurdles. She does this so effectively, in fact, that we almost don’t need the eventual explanation and backstory for her character’s mental state. It’s a physically demanding part that requires her to multitask between enacting the impact on an astronaut’s body as well as her character’s distressed and eventual hopeless outlook on what’s happening around her. And she has to carry this narrative weight almost entirely on her shoulders. Clooney is Clooney, but Bullock gives the outstanding central performance this film needs to work as well as it does.
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