Nov
27
“Titanic” Review
Filed Under Movies
With “Avatar” opening in just a few short weeks, I thought I’d revisit James Cameron’s greatest box office triumph, a film that is a victim of its own success, “Titanic.” It’s hard to believe that more than a decade has passed since the movie became an omnipresent force in our popular culture, which ain’t bad for a chick flick that lacks a bunch of wussy vampires. None of the “Star Wars” prequels could usurp this film’s B.O. haul, and neither could “Spider-Man” or even “The Dark Knight.” Movie geeks in general have a deep-seeded hatred for “Titanic” because it’s positively un-geeky, a historical romantic drama with a teen heartthrob in the lead.
And yet, I still dig the film.
On a side note, I find it kind of amazing that the most financially successful love story ever committed to film was written and directed by a dude who’s been married five times. That’s what you call irony, my friends.
For those of you who didn’t just watch the movie again last night, “Titanic” opens in the present day with a completely unnecessary framing device. Bill Paxton plays a modern day treasure hunter named Brock Lovett, who’s sifting through the wreckage of the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean. He and his team discover a safe inside one of the state rooms that they believe contains The Heart of the Ocean, a fist-sized blue diamond that’ll make them all rich. Once they crack the safe, though, they instead find a doodle of some hot naked chick wearing the diamond in a necklace. They really didn’t have to go to all that trouble to find nude images of Kate Winslet when the Internet is teeming with them. But then again, this is 1996 and people still use Netscape.
At any rate, news of this fairly inconsequential find makes it back to the States, and a 101-year-old woman named Rose (Gloria Stewart, who must’ve been smoking hot in the Mesozoic Era) reaches out to Brock, claiming that she’s the “dish” in the old picture. So she’s airlifted out to the middle of the Atlantic to begin having a series of lengthy flashbacks wherein the bulk of the film takes place.
Way, way back in 1912, we see Rose (now played by the luminous Kate Winslet) at 17. She’s engaged to wealthy industrialist Cal Hockley (Billy Zane at his most awesome) and not terribly thrilled with the concept. They board the Titanic with Rose’s loathsome crone of a mother and some two-thousand other people, including one artistically-inclined scamp named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who won his ticket in a poker game.
(Somehow, Old Rose is able to flash back to events she didn’t witness firsthand, like the particulars of how Jack got his ticket. This is why “Titanic” didn’t win the Oscar for Best Screenplay, folks.)
Suicidally depressed, Rose is about to throw herself off the ship later that evening when Jack comes along and talks her down with the film’s dialogue motif: “You jump, I jump.” Rose then slips and nearly falls into the crummy greenscreen effect that’s supposed to pass for the open ocean, but Jack saves her. And so begins the love story between Jack and Rose that everyone’s been waiting patiently for, bringing us that much closer to some rare PG-13 female nudity.
The film has a few historical inaccuracies, like the completely bogus claim that it was an iceburg that struck the Titanic when we all know it was in fact al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, the ship begins to sink, much to the passengers’ surprise, and the movie radically shifts gears. The lovey-dovey scenes in the film’s first half don’t quite pack the same punch as the rip-snorting disaster porn of the second half. Cameron’s more confident as a director when he’s nearly drowning his two leads than he is at getting them to sell his dialogue during the more intimate moments. It’s melodrama, though, so you go along with it. The characters are chess pieces anyway. Besides, knowing in advance that the ship’s doomed I think lends a sense of tragedy to the proceedings. It gives even some of Cameron’s really tin-eared groaners a dramatic heft.
I remember back when the movie came out, all these weirdos lamented that (*Spoiler*) Rose doesn’t get off the piece of flotsam and freeze to death in the water once she discovers Jack is no longer among the living (*End Spoiler*). What idiots. If she were to do that, we wouldn’t have the wholly unnecessary framing device that we return to at film’s end, where Old Rose chucks The Heart of the Ocean into the frigid depths, goes to bed and dreams about Jack for the bazillionth time.
And that brings me to another bit of stupid controversy concerning the denouement of this film. Old Rose does not die at the end of “Titanic.” The goddamn Celine Dion song over the credits tells you exactly what happens. She has a dream about Jack. Yeesh. It isn’t all that esoteric, really.
Twelve years on, “Titanic” still works. I might’ve been dismissive of some of the film’s hammier moments, but I think the movie has aged better than some of Cameron’s genre fare. The question remains, Will he top himself with “Avatar?” I doubt it. “Titanic” is one of the happiest accidents in film history, a movie that shouldn’t have been a mega-hit for so many reasons. And yet, the flick, unlike the ship, remains unsinkable to this day.
-Brad Lohan
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This was always MY favorite version of Titanic…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_moWBPK_bac
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