Titanic Review
by Kristian Lin (kristianlin AT sprintmail DOT com)January 4th, 1998
HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT
by Kristian Lin
I don't hate TITANIC. Not now, anyway. The last hour of it is terrifyingly excellent. It's not a hateful movie. It's just that the critics have gone overboard praising it, and bestowed something like artistic respectability on it. Come Oscar time, it'll get a few awards it doesn't deserve. It'll probably win Best Picture and defeat a movie that deserves it more, like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL or DONNIE BRASCO or ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION. And then I'll hate it. I'll be unhappy with the Academy voters for the fourth straight year.
TITANIC chronicles the romance between Philadelphia socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a roustabout in third-class. Rose feels trapped by her engagement to millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and Jack shows her that the poor live much better than their snooty counterparts in first-class. Unfortunately, the tub they're on has a date with an iceberg.
What is it about romantic tragedy that makes movie critics swoon? They're sane, intelligent beings who are paid to have a keener B.S. detector than the rest of us. The same people who went gaga over the well-made but diffuse THE ENGLISH PATIENT have pulled the same act for this movie. THE ENGLISH PATIENT, though, was at least consistently well-acted and -directed throughout. TITANIC, on the other hand, gives us scene after scene of rickety drama for two hours. Writer/director James Cameron's previous film, TRUE LIES, was two-thirds great action and one-third failed romance. The ratio is reversed in TITANIC, and the good parts aren't enough to justify one's time investment.
The picture may have all the period details right, but its tone is all wrong for its 1912 setting. James Horner's pallid, New Agey music immediately dates the movie as a 1990s period piece. More seriously, Cameron has no sense of how to write these characters and make them sound convincing. Leonardo DiCaprio is a gifted and terribly likeable actor, and not once did I believe him as a child of the 1890s (true, he's young, but Winona Ryder was younger when she did THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, and was much more idiomatically 19th Century). Chained to a pipe in a room filling with water, Jack says, "This is bad," with the same offhand detachment we've seen from hundreds of other movie heroes. When they aren't speaking in the telegraphic sort of dialogue that marks out most Hollywood action thrillers, Jack and Rose are advancing all sorts of enlightened notions that prove they're ahead of their time. Rose quotes Freud - a neat trick, since he hadn't been translated into English yet. Jack advances his philosophy of "making every day count." The two admire Monet and Picasso, but Jack's sketches (which Rose praises so highly) are hackwork. Rose and Jack may be unconventional for their time, but you'll find people talking like them in any high school today.
The dialogue is strictly purple prose, yet the other aspects of the script are even worse. One can admire Cameron for making poor people the heroes of his megabudget movie, but when the characters are stereotyped this baldly, he doesn't do anybody any favors. The villain never opens his mouth except to say something offensive; it's actually a relief that Billy Zane is so bad in the role, because you'd hate to see a good performance wasted in it. Jack teaches Rose to spit. She gives Cal the finger as she makes her getaway. Though Winslet looks tough enough wading through icy water, you still can't reconcile Rose's action heroine's resourcefulness with her hothouse-flower upbringing. Her attempts to extricate themselves from below decks belong in TRUE LIES or THE ABYSS. If Cameron had just put this movie on a modern-day cruise ship, it would have fixed many of his script's problems. Of course, no studio would have bankrolled his picture (at least not to the tune of $200 million) and had him end the movie unhappily. But if only TITANIC had had a dash of SPEED 2, it would have been far less fraudulent.
In retelling the ship's sinking, TITANIC is a compelling disaster flick, partly because the ship sinks so slowly. Most movie disasters like earthquakes, floods, and the destruction of the world by aliens happen relatively quickly. Killer viruses, on the other hand, are too slow to make for exciting visuals. The Titanic's eventual progress to the ocean floor means that the passengers are calm and businesslike at first, and then panic gradually sets in as the boat tilts further and further into the water. Amid the rising chaos, there's a nice touch: a tiny shot of a tiny ship sending out a tiny signal flare, capturing the futility and hopelessness of the passengers' predicament. As Rose hangs on to a railing for her life, her eyes meet those of a girl next to her. It's a marvelous moment of clarity; even before the girl plummets to her death, you know their brief, wordless acquaintance will never leave Rose's memory.
There's also an interesting chemistry between the oddly matched DiCaprio and Winslet. Maybe he isn't convincingly 1910s, but despite his youth he exudes the cool confidence that only movie stars seem to have. It's no wonder that Rose is attracted to Jack - he's not of her world, but he slips into it with such ease that you don't feel that she's slumming. The two leads give the illusion that their romance isn't old hat. Kathy Bates, who's always welcome, gives her part as "Unsinkable Molly" Brown a good dose of spice.
Cameron has the right idea in framing a love story within the ship's sinking. He's smart enough to know that a special effects movie without a human interest will turn off an audience (witness the fate of STARSHIP TROOPERS and many others like it). But his script is so thinly ontrived, the result is the same. It's right for us to praise TITANIC for its technical wizardry and the very real filmmaking skills of its director. But we should recognize that the movie's human elements are entirely stale, however appealingly packaged.
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