TITANIC
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: "Titanic" is indeed the word for the
huge film TITANIC. While it has been filmed several
times, this will be the version people will
remember first for years to come. Still, a
melodramatic love triangle with a villainous jilted
fiance firing off guns on the sinking ship is just
not what the story of the ill-fated ship needed.
The film could have had more historic detail, less
fiction, and could have been even more enjoyable.
But Titanic's warning that no technology is totally
safe from failure is more timely today than it was
in 1912 at the time of the sinking. Rating: 6 (0
to 10), high +1 (-4 to +4)
There are really two approaches to making a film about the sinking of the Titanic, and both were tried in the 1950s. The 1953 film TITANIC had passenger Clifton Webb reacting to discovering that his son was illegitimate. Impending death as the ship sinks changes his attitude for the better. On the other hand, the 1958 film A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is a dramatization of passengers' accounts of the sinking of the great ship. They had some false ideas about the sinking, but for the most part they were trying to accurately portray events that happened that night. The 1953 TITANIC is a pleasant old film and fun to watch; A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is a cinema classic. As one might imagine, there were a large number of very dramatic stories going on at the same time when the Titanic sank. It just is not necessary to invent a fictional story to take place at the same time, and it is an irritating distraction from what most of the audience considers the real story they paid to see. The 1997 TITANIC, written and directed by James Cameron, is about a very one-sided love triangle set on the Titanic. At 194 minutes, the film also has time for some detail about the sinking including some that has never been filmed before. But overall it has less historic detail than the much shorter and lower- budgeted A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. That is in part because James Cameron takes almost two hours of screen time to get the Titanic to the iceberg and even after it does hit, he still cannot bring himself to believe that the audience is more interested in the sinking ship than in his banal love story.
Visually, the 1997 TITANIC is by far the best version, but for historical detail, I think the real enthusiasts about the sinking will probably prefer the 1958 telling. Cameron seems to accept this by borrowing many scenes almost intact. Some of these may be from historic accounts, but the similarities go beyond the content of the borrowed scenes. The incidents are simply re-filmed using the same style.
The film begins with some intrepid young explorers, led by Brock Lovett (played by Bill Paxton dragging along memories of his too similar role in TWISTER), exploring the recently found sunken hull of the RMS Titanic and in particular looking for a (fictional) diamond that supposedly went down with the great ship. They do not find the diamond itself, but they do find a drawing of a nude woman wearing the diamond. When the drawing is shown on television, a woman calls the team to say that not only can she identify the picture, she is the woman. (Hey, would you believe the elderly woman is Gloria Stuart, who played opposite Melvyn Douglas and Boris Karloff in OLD DARK HOUSE and opposite Claude Rains in THE INVISIBLE MAN?)
As the old woman tells the explorers her story, we drift back to the sailing of the Titanic. Rose DeWitt Buketer (Kate Winslet) is from a family of old money and new debt. Her mother has arranged a marriage between her and Cal Hockley (Billy Zane, played as quite possibly the most obnoxious American man then alive). This part is extremely over- written, with Hockley making judgments that Pablo Picasso will never amount to anything in the art world and that lifeboats are a waste of space on the unsinkable Titanic. Having to watch him on the screen for a few hours is painful; a lifetime with him would have to be worse than death. At least that is what Rose decides and is ready to cast herself into the cold ocean when Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young artist from the lower classes and the lower decks, steps forward and convinces her to live. Of course he is everything that Cal is not, including poor, unfortunately. But of course the two fall madly in love. And of course the angry and spoiled Cal plots revenge. Even after the Titanic strikes an iceberg--sorry, was that supposed to have a spoiler warning?--the film still concerns itself too much with this love triangle and not enough with the sinking ship. Earlier we have seen parts of the ship behaving perfectly. We should revisit the engine room and its machinery with grasshopper-like legs kicking fly- wheels and see what flooding is doing to it. One wants to return to the radio room and see what is happening there as the operator desperately tries to find help. Instead we follow a fictional Cal hatching nefarious plots at Jack's expense. It is class warfare at its most obvious. This is one time when truth would be a lot more interesting than fiction.
Frightfully underutilized is Kathy Bates as the unsinkable and likably straightforward Molly Brown. Also misused is David Warner as Cal's one-dimensional thug and bodyguard. And why bother casting Eric Braeden/Hans Gudegast as John Jacob Astor if you do not intend to use him?
What we do see of the ship's problems, and in so long a film that is still quite a bit, is enough to make this the most visually impressive rendition of the sinking, at least in other ways. We might expect that from a film produced by both Paramount and Fox, costing $200,000,000--making it the most expensive American film ever, perhaps beaten only by the Russian version of WAR AND PEACE. (The original ship itself cost about $7,500,000, incidentally.) Camera shots flying us the length of the ship are jaw-droppers even if they do have the feel of digital images. Seeing dramatized the contortions of the ship as it breaks up is new to cinema and pretty scary.
TITANIC does make the mistake that every version of the sinking makes, something that could be called "angular continuity." Until it breaks up at the very end, the Titanic was a rigid ship. This means that if one stateroom is tipped at a 27-degree angle, at the same instant of time every room, every deck, every walkway is also tipped at a 27-degree angle. During the sinking every scene should show a room tipped at just a bit more of an angle than the previous scene. No film version has ever paid close enough attention to angular continuity. It means, for one thing, that before shooting one has to know exactly the order of the shots and that order cannot be rearranged in the editing (well, perhaps only minimally). The angle of tipping varies wildly from scene to scene. A room will be shown tipped at a high angle, but in the next scene dishes will fall off shelves that should have fallen considerably earlier.
TITANIC is a lot of movie for the same priced ticket as anything else at the multiplex. This is a big film with a lot to like as well as a lot to not. For this budget and with digital technology the story could have been told with supreme accuracy and been a much more compelling film at the same time. Overall I give it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
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