TITANIC (1997) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Believe the hype.
After all of the rumors, the negative press, the calamity on the set and the endlessly upward-spiraling budget, the executive nail-biting and the snip-and-fret editing, James Cameron's TITANIC is nothing short of a total success. It does not enhance Cameron's reputation to the status of a Kurosawa -- which I don't discount, it just hasn't happened here -- but he's certainly on the level of a D.W. Griffith. It's the fastest-moving three hours you're likely to spend in a movie theater, and some of the best.
Why this project? I asked myself that -- at first with dismay, and then with mounting anticipation -- when Cameron first announced his intentions to go down there and film the hulk of the ship itself. Now I have a theory: Cameron's TERMINATOR movies were, in a way, about a gigantic paradigm shift. the sinking of Titanic was the beginning of the end of an era, the era of total social stability, of man's certainty of his domination over nature. Now we are a little more cautious, if no less ambitious; just more aware that we can be smashed down quite easily when we're not looking in the right direction. But neither Skynet nor Titanic are themselves to blame -- they're just the agents of man's shortsightedness writ large. (There are various apocalyptic overtones which I'll save for another essay.)
But if the movie's wrapper is Titanic's hulk at the bottom of the Atlantic, the core is a buoyant love story which unfolds during the course of Titanic's one voyage partway across the ocean. And to make the whole thing work, Cameron made some fairly hard storytelling and directorial decisions early on. He could have opted for a more "Altmanesque" approach, in which a whole congeries of lives intertwined and wove through each other on that day, but he shirked that device in favor of a fistful of tightly colliding characters. Everyone wants something from everyone else, and they are going to have a hell of a time getting it: your basic ingredients for good drama.
Winslet's character, both in the past and future, is a solid addition to the roster of Cameron heroines: a stubborn woman with a mind, who's often despised by the men around her. When she first begins to speak of the ship, Cameron very wisely holds back on showing us exactly what she's talking about. "The sheets had never been slept in," she says; "the china never eaten from. The paint was still fresh." Her words in our minds evoke images by themselves -- and then Cameron takes over and shows us what images her words are evoking in the minds of the salvage crew. This is just a tiny example of the movie's directorial genius.
The characters themselves are Damon Runyan stock figures, but again, they're ennobled and made interesting through a unique marriage of writing, acting and direction. They're interesting to watch, just to see what happens next. Jack Dawson (Leonardo Di Caprio) is a young roustabout who wins a ticket onboard in a poker match, and Kate Winslet plays the younger Rose as an upper-class beauty who is never less than uncomfortable in a whalebone corset. Billy Zane is greasy and hateful as her husband-to-be (his love for her seems to be an unholy cocktail of equal parts sadism, masochism, and desperation), and the supporting players (especially the proverbial Titanic deck band) fill out the story's hollow corners and give the movie the feeling of an ongoing slice of life.
Both floating and sinking, we are never less than convinced that Titanic is there, on screen, in front of us. The movie earns such a total suspension of disbelief from the audience that we feel we could walk around the ship in our minds after leaving the theater. There's a requisite amount of repetitiveness in the final hour of the movie -- the ship is sinking, sinking, *still* sinking, etc. -- but all of that is underscored with the terrible tensions of the main characters. We've come to give a damn about them; they make the hoary cliche of the sinking ship into something new.
There is no end of wonderful moments: The part where Jack shows Rose how to spit -- and how to fly. The scene in the car in steerage. The elderly couple on the bed. The aforementioned deck band, playing until the bitter end. And the incredible sight of that ship snapping in half like a stepped-on twig.
It's hard to speak modestly of a movie like TITANIC, which has ungodly huge ambitions. It wants to entertain; it wants to be romantic and moving; it wants to thrill. It does all of those magnificently. Not only that, but it was definitely all worth waiting this long for.
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