DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane,
Gloria Stuart, David Warner, Bill Paxton, Kathy Bates,
Frances Fisher, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill,
Danny Nucci, Jonathan Hyde, Suzy Amis, Eric Braeden,
Jenette Goldstein, Ioan Gruffudd
REVIEW:
With sci-fi thrillers like The Terminator
, Terminator 2
, Aliens
, and The Abyss, and the action-comedy True Lies under his belt, James Cameron turned his sights in a totally different direction for his next project….a romance set onboard the notorious ill-fated luxury ship the RMS Titanic. Nearly anyone knows the basics of the story of the 1912 disaster, with more than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus passengers, including many rich and famous of the day, perishing at sea when the “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, but none among the many, many films to deal with Titanic had the means to bring the massive ship and its end to the screen with such visual splendor. To draw crowds, Cameron centered his script around a star struck love story, cast with primed-to-explode heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and soon-to-be Oscar nominee Kate Winslet. Titanic clearly struck a chord with audiences, standing for twelve years as the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassed only by Cameron’s next film, 2009’s Avatar
. Unfortunately, it’s also overrated, and the story doesn’t equal the spectacular visuals surrounding it.
We start out in the present, with treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) thinking he’s found the safe containing a priceless diamond but finding only a nude drawing of a young woman wearing the diamond around her neck. His discovery attracts the attention of 101-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart), who nonchalantly announces that the woman in the drawing is herself. Hoping to learn where to find the diamond, Brock agrees to listen to her account of her time onboard the Titanic. Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), the well-brought-up daughter of Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher), boards the new luxury liner RMS Titanic with her mother and snooty fiancé Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). Despite her wealth and cultivation, Rose is miserable, trapped in a socially appropriate and financially advantageous but loveless engagement with the controlling Cal, and is contemplating throwing herself off the back of the ship when she is stopped by steerage passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an artist who lives like “a tumbleweed blowing in the wind” and won his ticket in a card game. Despite the attempts of her mother and Cal’s manservant Lovejoy (David Warner) to thwart their relationship, Jack and Rose’s love affair teaches Rose to seize her own life with both hands, but they’re headed for a collision course with fate that will cast everything into peril.
The positives first: from a technical and visual standpoint, Titanic is nearly flawless. At $200 million, it was one of the most expensive movies ever made (one of the few to surpass it was Cameron’s next project, Avatar, twelve years later), and James Cameron and his crew spent a prodigious amount of time, research, effort, and money meticulously and painstakingly recreating Titanic and its catastrophic end. The ship was represented through a combination of state-of-the-art CGI and a 775-foot, 90% scale model which was sunk in a 17 million gallon tank specially constructed for the movie, and once the ship has had its inevitable collision with the iceberg, around the two hour mark (out of a three hour runtime), Cameron’s virtuoso adeptness at helming large-scale action-adventure visual effects extravaganza kicks in, providing plenty of eye-popping sights. Technically, Titanic is an impressive accomplishment.
It’s too bad Cameron didn’t spend as much time perfecting his script. While I’m not accusing Cameron of intentionally trivializing the epic disaster, his script has that effect by narrowing everything down into a cookie cutter love story. Everything about Jack and Rose’s story is clichéd, from the love struck couple divided by social class to the one-dimensional sneering elitist fiancé. Cameron’s script also attempts to be too clever for its own good, simultaneously making self-consciously heavy-handed references to the time period, with Rose mentioning Freud and buying paintings by a “Picasso something or other” despite Cal’s insistence that they’ll never amount to anything, and trying to be “hip” for modern teenage viewers by throwing in Jack teaching Rose to spit like a man and Rose giving Lovejoy the middle finger. We’re supposed to fall for the epic love story so that we’re on the edge of our seat when it’s put in harm’s way, but we’re insufficiently captivated to the point that we find ourselves waiting for the iceberg to show up to kick things into gear, with the result that even when the disaster does come, it doesn’t have as much impact as it should.
Kate Winslet received her first of six Academy Award nominations for Titanic, and her performance is admirable, bringing an amount of conviction and heart to the role that makes hers the best acting the film has to offer (she also manages a mostly convincing American accent). Rose may be temporarily resigned to a loveless arranged marriage and expectations of society, but it only takes a little push to bring out the smart and independent woman waiting to burst out underneath (and this is a James Cameron movie, which means his initially prim and proper heroine eventually gets into the act of spitting in her loathsome fiancé’s face, breaking Jack’s handcuffs with a fire axe, and punching uncooperative crewmen). Despite his popularity being launched into the stratosphere by his role here, Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t as successful. He’s in fact a year older than Winslet, but his baby faced boyishness here makes him look significantly younger, and the sense of a wet-behind-the-ears lightweight extends to his acting. Both are saddled with clichéd dialogue, but unlike Winslet, DiCaprio can’t muster the conviction to pull off making them sound like more, leaving them an unequal pair in screen presence and therefore throwing off their entire chemistry, which never truly catches on fire despite scenes depicting him sketching her nude and later a steamy but tastefully discreet love scene ending with a hand sliding down a fogged-up car window that’s more unintentionally amusing than erotic. Jack and Rose’s love story never truly compels us; in fact, there was more sense of a heartfelt connection between both Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in the original Terminator, and between Avatar’s Jake Sully and Neytiri, and the latter involved a human and a ten-foot-tall blue CGI alien. Of the others, Billy Zane is saddled with the most one-dimensional character in the movie, and plays him in such an affected, over-the-top, perpetually sneering way that he’s more ridiculous than detestable. Gloria Stuart maintains her dignity and has a couple affecting moments, while David Warner is suitably ominous. Recognizable faces abound in smaller roles- Kathy Bates as the (in)famous socialite Molly Brown, Victor Garber as Titanic’s designer Thomas Andrews, Bernard Hill as Captain Smith, Eric Braeden (General Hospital) as John Jacob Aster, the world’s richest man, and Jonathan Hyde as company man J. Bruce Ismay, who pushes Smith to increase speed to make headlines and scoffs at even the grossly inadequate number of lifeboats onboard, considering them completely unnecessary. With the exception of Bates’ Molly, who is sneered at as uncouth by the old money onboard but shows more heart and spunk than any of them (and occasionally lends Jack a helping hand), and arguably Garber’s Andrews, who accepts his fate with a stoic resignation, these are all pretty thankless roles that serve only as background filler (the 1996 made-for-TV movie Titanic, despite vastly less impressive visual effects and its own share of soap opera, did a better job fleshing out historical characters like Smith, Aster, and Ismay). Attentive viewers may notice Jenette Goldstein, who appeared for Cameron in both Aliens and Terminator 2, in a small role as an Irish mother, and a young Ioan Gruffudd, who some will know now from the Fantastic Four films and the BBC series Horatio Hornblower, as one of Titanic’s officers. Bill Paxton, a Cameron regular (The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies) serves as the sounding board for the elderly Rose’s narration, along with Suzy Amis, the fifth and current Mrs. James Cameron.
It’s easy to make an argument that, even if Titanic’s love story is less-than-enthralling, the movie merits at least one viewing for its visual spectacle and meticulous recreation of the final hours of the doomed ship. Titanic’s sinking has been portrayed many times, but never with anywhere remotely close to this budget, technical accomplishment, or historical accuracy. In the last hour of the movie, we are reminded that, however lacking his script may be, Cameron is a masterful filmmaker who knows how to helm large-scale action sequences and spectacular visual effects scenes like few other directors. The lengthy climax has any number of memorable and haunting images: the ship’s bow reaching for the stars, standing briefly perfectly on end before beginning its descent into the sea, water rushing through ornate hallways, a body suspended weightlessly in the water, dress billowing around it, and most hauntingly, the famous violin players launching their performance of “Nearer My God To Thee” and the aftermath of the ocean filled with frozen corpses. There are instances of both heroic bravery and self-sacrifice, and abject cowardice, and many of the most famous moments from countless depictions of the sinking are faithfully included: the aforementioned violinists, the steerage passengers trapped below deck, lifeboats launched with a fraction of their maximum load, the suicide of 1st Officer Murdoch (Ewan Stewart), and a number of the VIPs onboard, including Captain Smith, John Jacob Aster, Thomas Andrews, and Benjamin Guggenheim (Michael Ensign), facing their lot with a resigned, gentlemanly dignity in sharp contrast to Ismay, the man at whose feet much of the blame can be laid, who slips onto a lifeboat when no one is watching. There are other nice touches here and there. Rose's mother, who looks at Jack like something she would wipe off her shoe, seems as stereotypical and one-dimensional as Cal, but one scene fleshes out her motives, and we see they're a little more complicated than we thought. If he'd bothered that much with every character, and the plot in general, we may have had a stronger film. Despite the flatness of the central Jack-Rose love affair, the film is not entirely unaffecting: there are moments scattered throughout the climax guaranteed to generate wet eyes, and the epilogue affirms Cameron as a romantic at heart.
But while much of what surrounds it is impressive, the fact that Cameron has chosen to focus so exclusively on the Jack-Rose romance, with everyone and everything else as background filler, means the movie's success is tied inextricably to the strength or weakness of the central love story, and its flatness leaves much of Titanic feeling like a showcase for impressive visual effects, and in its climax like a docudrama of Titanic's demise. I am tempted to recommend it for at least one viewing for the sake of the last two aspects, but Titanic is much less successful as its replacement as box office king, Avatar, at balancing spectacular visual effects extravaganza and giving us a story we care about (and Titanic is set against the backdrop of a real-life historical tragedy, so it has little excuse). The parts of the story we do care about usually have nothing directly to do with Rose and particularly Jack, and they receive only perfunctory attention. Titanic's visuals may be epic, but its story is disappointingly generic.
**1/2
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