Titanic
Written and directed by James Cameron Starring Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater)
A film review by Chris Loar
_Titanic_ is twice the film it should be and only half the film it wants to be. It's a strange piece of work, half _Gone with the Wind_, half _Poseidon Adventure_, half _Pygmalion_, half _Shawshank Redemption_. That's a lot to pack into a single movie, even one that runs as long as this one.
All this to say: Cameron has tried to make the film of his career here, and it shows. He has succeeded, to the extent that this film has entertained tens of thousands of people, and to the extent that it will make him rich beyond imagining. He has failed, though, to the extent that the film he has made, although impressive and adventuresome, is some distance from being his best work; in spite of its strong cast and its much- vaunted special effects, the film is hardly as taut and exciting as, say, _Terminator_, and in a lot of ways has less substance and moral weight as well. You should go see _Titanic_ (if, indeed, there is anyone left who hasn't). Go see it -- you'll have a good-to-great time watching it, for despite its many failings, its story hangs together better than any blockbuster project of recent years -- so far beyond _ID4_ and _Jurassic Park_ as to be almost incomparable. But Cameron's film is also a serious disappointment. Its opening sequences hint at, threaten us with, even promise us something like artistic achievement, a meditation on time and memory and loss. In the end, we're left with a disaster flick -- maybe the best disaster movie ever, but a disaster movie nonetheless.
The story is told in flashback. We open in the present day, with actual footage of the wreckage of the real-life _Titanic_. These first scenes are the finest in the film. We're shown images of once-luxuriant rooms, and there's something haunting about the image of this sort of luxury fallen into decay. Cameron plays on this effect by recreating these same rooms in lavish detail later in the film.
The explorer who shows us this wreckage (played competently by Bill Paxton) soon meets up with a survivor of the wreck -- Rose DeWitt Bukater (played in the present day by Gloria Stuart and in flashback by Kate Winslet). Rose is in the present day something of a bohemian artist, but once upon a time was the only child of a financially-troubled aristocratic family. Her mother (Frances Fisher) sees the family's only hope in marrying her child to the affluent, arrogant Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) -- a match for which Rose displays something less than enthusiasm. Our flashback commences with Rose, Cal, and their entourage arranging to have their immense array of luggage placed aboard the ship; we then cut to a sharply contrasting scene, where the adventurous, impoverished, seat-of-the-pants Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is busy winning his passage to America in a high-stakes poker game. He and his companion win just as the ship is disembarking, and scurry aboard carrying a single bag.
These two scenes really tell you everything you need to know about the two social worlds that Cameron presents here. The one, symbolized by Hockley and his class, are affluent, complacent, sterile, and completely unreal; the other, on display below decks, is poverty-stricken but very much alive. Our story here revolves around Rose's disenchantment with the first world, and her attraction to the second. For she looks forward to a life with Hockley as one might look at a prison sentence; it's only when she meets and begins to fall in love with Jack Dawson, who sees life as a gift to be appreciated anew each day, that she starts to imagine that life might hold some pleasures after all.
Kate Winslet is really just heartbreakingly good as Rose. She's left me a little cold in the past -- especially in her recent appearance as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's _Hamlet_ -- but perhaps that's just because she's never been used quite so effectively before. If Cameron is good at anything, it's in seeing the ability of his female leads to project strength, and Winslet projects it here, in a much more convincing and human way than, say, Sigourney Weaver. And DiCaprio isn't bad either; what he lacks in presence, depth, and real charisma, he more than makes up for with his energy and his winning smile. He doesn't really need to portray a character here, anyway; Jack Dawson is really more of an idea than a real person. He is the embodiment of freedom and risk, a symbol of the American dream, and icon of everything that Cal Hockley is not, of everything the rich in general are presumed not to be. In any case, he and Winslet are fun to watch on screen together; their chemistry is rather low-wattage, but it has a kind of pleasant flirty sparkle, and they have a few sequences together that are genuinely moving.
The rest of the tale unfolds rather like a road map, without much in the way of real surprises. This isn't a bad thing; it's pleasant and intermittently exciting watching Jack and Rose fall for each other, and it's especially fun watching Rose lose her inhibitions and let her hair down a little. Winslet uses her face very effectively in this transition, moving ably from a stiff, unsmiling British mask to a face that's unreserved and laughing out loud. But while there are a few surprises in the performances, there aren't any in the plot; the pair fall in love, Hockley learns of their relationship and becomes enraged, and the powers that be separate the two by force.
It's at this point in the story that the _Titanic_ strikes that infamous iceberg; and, at this point, both the ship and the film start sinking rapidly. For Cameron can't seem to resist letting the physical drama of the sinking ship drown out the emotional drama of what is unfolding between Jack and Rose. There are some fine moments between the two even in this final hour, and the entire sequence works pretty well as a simple disaster movie sequence, but the two types of action don't harmonize especially well. Ultimately, and inevitably, the more delicate dynamics of the love story sink along with the ship. The balance is restored during some fine, quiet moments after the ship goes down, but by then, for me, it was already too late. The audience I saw the film with agreed with me, I think; the theater, which had been largely silent and absorbed in the story for the film's first two-thirds, started to erupt in giggling at inappropriate moments and began to offer snide comments to the corpses on the screen. Cameron's handling of this whole sequence breaks the spell that he, Winslet, and DiCaprio have managed to cast, and so my attention wanders, leaving what could be a lyrical moment at the film's end looking slightly maudlin, even ludicrous.
The film's other serious disappointment comes in the form of its much-touted special effects. I know I'm in the minority here, but I simply have to say that _Titanic_ is not a better film for having indulged itself with a bloated FX budget. Any number of computer- generated effects in this film could have been created less expensively and more convincingly with other means. Many of the effects in this film look, to me, cheesy or downright shoddy (check out, for example, what passes for a night sky in the North Atlantic; whether computer-generated or not, it wouldn't convince anyone who had ever left the confines of Los Angeles). And even the best effects don't really have much in the way of visual artistry. Cameron is a skilled director of people; he made his reputation with his innovative and almost subversive use of Arnold Schwarzenegger in _Terminator_, and throughout his career I've continued to admire the way he's used all sorts of performers -- whether straight-up, like Ed Harris, or ironically, like Jamie Lee Curtis. He's much less impressive when he doesn't have actors to work with; it's therefore a painful irony that so much of his reputation rests on his lavish use of effects.
On the other hand, the score that Cameron has chosen is unusually good for an epic romance -- varied and energetic, without seeming intrusive. And he does back up his leads with a very passable group of supporting performers (though Kathy Bates is really not at her best as the Unsinkable Molly Brown).
_Titanic_, then, is twice the film it should be and only half the film it wants to be. It's at least twice as good as any historical disaster epic has any right to be, with its occasionally powerful performances and likable story. But it never quite reaches the majesty of what is hinted at in the opening sequences -- the haunting images of the ship's wreckage dissolving seamlessly into the living, breathing decadence of the early twentieth century. Those images will stay with me; and, if I'm unhappy about what Cameron has done here, it's perhaps only because he has promised so much more than he actually delivers.
(c) 1998 Chris Loar
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