Throughout
the 1990s, I had an unintended but still well-maintained habit of missing the
big Oscar-sweeping prestige picture of the year, especially the ones that
nudged the three-hour mark and made a billion dollars. I've still never seen Dances With Wolves. I only caught up with Braveheart a few years ago. (Same goes
for 2000's Gladiator.) And I completely missed
out on Titanic. Not once did I grumble to
myself "Well, if it's that popular, it must suck. I ain't a-gonna see it. Kids
these days, and their blasted crap entertainment, muzza fruzzle wumble grmp.
Get offa my lawn." It was more like "Well, Titanic is the number-one-grossing movie in America
for the 15th week running. Eh, I'll get around to seeing it eventually. It's
obviously still going to be there." And so it was—the IMDB notes that it
was the first movie released to VHS while it was still playing in theaters.
That statistic about it being the number-one movie 15 weeks in a row isn't an
exaggeration; it actually happened. Titanic remains the number-one box-office draw of all
time, both in the U.S. and abroad: more than $600 million in America, $1.8 billion internationally.
And
yet I still never got around to watching it, maybe because Titanic fever was so high that I
felt like I had watched it already. Without
actively seeking out any details, simply by dint of being on the Internet and
seeing the ads and watching the Oscars and being exposed to the parodies, I
wound up knowing every major plot point, from the present-day framing story to
the few twists of the core plot. And I wound up seeing certain
shots—Jack's "I'm the king of the world!" moment, Jack and Rose "flying"
together in the Titanic's bow, various
special-effects moments where pinwheeling bodies fell from the raised stern of
the ship to the icy waters below—over and over and over. And then there
was "My Heart Will Go On," which I'm fairly convinced was pumped directly into
the air and the water back in 1997; even for someone who doesn't live by pop
radio, that song was inescapable. Titanic overkill fever hit me early and kept me away
from theaters.
I
don't respect people who hate something just because it's popular. At the same
time, there's a certain degree of exhaustion and irritation in being told
repeatedly that you just have to experience something,
because absolutely everyone is, and you just have to love it, because
absolutely everyone does. Especially since it's
in the big corporations' interest to make sure that there's a new everybody's-into-this,
you-have-to-catch-up product every day. Eventually, exhaustion sets in, and it
tends to hit me with the big everybody-loves-this movies and albums.
But
it's been 11 years, and Titanic fever has cooled down a wee
tad, and yeah, when I mentioned in an A.V. Club production meeting that I'd
never seen it, I did get the "Whaaaaaat?" treatment from my fellow critics, so
obviously it was time. So I sat down and watched it.
And
I mostly found it to be a glossy, empty experience. I went in half-braced to
hate it, and I didn't. I went in half-expecting to be completely, shamefacedly
caught up and overwhelmed in the love story that charmed millions, and I
wasn't. I came out thinking "That was a technically well-made movie that spent
an incredible amount of money on special effects, and you can see exactly where
the cash went." And that was about it.
There
were a handful of things I really, really liked about Titanic, and one of the biggest was
the structure. A zillion jokes have been made about spoilers for this movie
("Hey… the boat sinks!"), and writer-director James Cameron took that attitude
into account. Anyone going into the movie either knows Titanic's history already, or had a
lifetime's worth of World War II movies spoiled for them last week when some
loose-lipped wag online pointed out that Hitler did not conquer the world in
the '40s. So he puts it right up front, with a video simulation hosted by a
creepily enthusiastic computer geek:
There.
Now the audience knows not just that the ship sinks, but exactly how, and how
long it took, and they're all primed up not just to accept how it happens later
in the film, but to anticipate each stage of the disaster, and cringe at what
they know is coming. Granted, that doesn't explain why the entire crew of a
fortune-hunting ship is gathered around a computer to explain to a Titanic survivor how the Titanic sank. Do they think she
doesn't know?
But
that's just being bitchy. The point is, this scene leads directly to what
became my favorite part of the movie, the point where the ship has hit the
iceberg, the "watertight compartments" are filling with water, and the designer
knows the ship is eventually going down, but no one else does. The iceberg
strike felt like a minor bump, the ship seems fine, everyone's oblivious, and
then he comes in shrieking like a prophet of doom, with his crazy story about
how the ship is going down. As yet, there's no disaster-movie running around
and panicking—no one but the crew knows what's happening, which gives
that crew ample time to sit still and contemplate just how bad things are going
to be. This is a kind of quiet, creeping horror rarely afforded to $200 million
disaster movies.
From
there, the movie goes into a heightened surrealism that says a lot of
entertaining things about how people approach catastrophe, with confusion and
denial and outright bureaucratic lies. The scenes where the upper-crust
passengers refuse to stand out on the cold deck, or get into the scary
lifeboats, and stand around in the salon listening to music and ordering drinks
and bitching, were some of my favorites in the film. And once things really
start to fall apart and the ship is obviously sinking and Titanic becomes a flat-out disaster
film, it's as well-made as 11-year-old special-effects extravaganzas get.
But
before we get to this point, there's close to two hours of setup and love story
to get through, and that's where Titanic just didn't sell me at all.
The
story in ultra-brief, more for the sake of form than because I actually believe
there are people reading this who don't know anything about it: Kate Winslet
plays Rose, a "spirited" aristocrat who's miserably engaged to puffed-up bad
guy Cal (Billy Zane). She sees her whole life stretching out drearily in front
of her as an endless series of boring parties, so during the Titanic's maiden voyage, she flirts
with suicide and is rescued / met cute by Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio, at his
charmingest and floppy-haired-iest), a poor boy who won his third-class ticket
in a poker game. Much to Cal's chagrin, Rose is charmed by and then infatuated
with the free-spirited Jack, who listens to what she says, doesn't talk down to
her, and doesn't, say, make smarmy cracks to her mother about limiting her
reading material in order to curb her individualistic impulses. Also, Jack
teaches her to spit like a man.
For
me, the whole Jack-Rose-Cal plot read like the ur-chick-lit novel. It's just
about the most basic possible expression of a romantic female fantasy. (Also
like a remake of 1994's Reality
Bites, but
with fewer rooftop Schoolhouse
Rock sing-alongs
and more mass death.) If only every woman in the world was periodically forced
to choose between two fantastically beautiful men—one rich and civilized
yet stuffy, and one poor but free and capable. Then we wouldn't have to keep
seeing that plotline over and over again, because everyone would be so bored
from dealing with it in real life that it wouldn't be the stuff of clichéd dreams.
As
love stories go, this one was serviceable enough. I enjoyed the performances.
Billy Zane as the comically awful bad guy seems to be having loads of fun even
though he lacks a mustache to twirl. Everyone is extremely pretty and smooth
and they all project passion—passionate love, passionate anger,
passionate sorrow—fervently on cue. I just found it hard to care about
their story, perhaps because it's all so heightened and polished and poreless.
In fact, the film is so polished that it
periodically reminded me of another well-known period piece: Newsies. Particularly during the
shots down in the engine room, where people in surprisingly clean, well-made
clothes run around surprisingly clean, polished machinery in a surprisingly
crisp, well-coordinated dance. (Yes, it was the ship's maiden voyage, and
everything hadn't had time to get properly dirty. Even so, nothing down there
looked particularly real.)
Something
else frustratingly unreal? The sheer weight of the movie's cheap irony. Every
few minutes, someone says something that we're meant to laugh or cringe at
because we know history well enough to know just how wrong the characters are.
Jack repeatedly talks about how very, very lucky he was to get a ticket on Titanic. Various people claim the
boat is unsinkable. A friend tells Jack that he'll never in a million years get
to be close to a lady as beautiful as Rose. Cal displays his ignorance by
sneering over a Picasso painting, and saying "Picasso? He won't amount to a
thing. He won't, trust me!" A lady in steerage tells her sweet moppet not to
worry about the fact that all the third-class passengers have been sealed up
below decks with the water rapidly advancing—they're all going to get
onto lifeboats once the upper-class people are rescued. It's like foreshadowing
and mean gags at the characters' expense all rolled up into one.
Still,
it's hard to argue with the movie's majesty, with the sheer weight of the
visuals: The size and sweep and scope of the ship as it stands in dock or pulls
out of the harbor. The incredible opulence of the set. The massive crowd of
gorgeously costumed extras. The money that almost literally drips off the
screen. There's always something to look at in this film.
So
there's a lot of romantic hoo-rah where Cal is mean to Rose and Rose gets on
her high horse at Jack and Jack is the smoothest, charming-est charmer who was
ever smooth, and she falls for him and Cal says snide things about him. And
Kate Winslet gets naked, which was probably worth the price of admission for an
awful lot of people reluctantly dragged to the big romance boat movie. And the
lovers are repeatedly denied, which was good for a bunch of pained yearning
back in Shakespeare's day, and is good for a bunch of pained yearning now. And
then eventually—you read the spoiler at the beginning, right?—the
boat sinks.
And
then Titanic becomes a really compelling
disaster movie, as dread turns, painfully slowly, to panic. This was where the
movie finally grabbed me. But it didn't grab me because of Jack and Rose and
their romance—I was entirely absorbed by how real the ship looked, going
down, and how easily I could feel what it would be like hanging onto what had
once been a gigantic, solid island, and had suddenly become an upended chunk of
wood sinking into a pitilessly freezing sea. Yeah, the effects are a little
dated at times, 10 years out—if nothing else, it's often clear exactly
when the "ship" Cameron is panning across is a giant computer graphic covered
with tiny CGI people—but the ship-sinking is still amazing. There are
some weird sequences that veer way off tone—the segment where Rose gets
the axe to try to cut Jack out of his handcuffs felt like a wacky small-scale
comedy with oddly symphonic, serious music behind it—but often, the film
is fairly scary, what with the looming sense of inevitable tragedy and
impending horrible death.
And
then there's the flat-out morbidity that overtakes people when they realize the
end is coming. I felt a lot more for the couple that chooses to lie down in bed
together and await death, or the engineer who snaps and ends up carefully
adjusting the time on a clock as his ship goes down, than I did for the heroes.
Overall,
though, I personally found Titanic to be a fairly patchy experience, absorbing in some
segments but losing me entirely at others, a wee bit cheesy when it really
shouldn't have been, and drawn in big, broad strokes that didn't much appeal to
me. So am I saying that hundreds of millions of moviegoers who beat me to
watching it are wrong? No, I'm really not. But when it comes to the question of
whether I was better off seeing this movie late than never… well, I could have
given it another decade, honestly.
But
there's this. One reason I'm glad I saw Titanic is because I can finally appreciate all the
stories about how it was made. The IMDB trivia section on this film is
staggering: It was, at the time, the most expensive film ever made, and some of
the money went to places that simply boggle the mind of lesser mortals. One
particularly bizarre tidbit: the part about how only one side of the boat was
actually constructed…†but it was the wrong side of
the boat for the scene in port, so all the extras were given special reversed
costumes (with the men's suit handkerchief pockets on the opposite side, for
instance) so the whole scene could be shot and then reversed without anyone
noticing. Stories like that are a lot of what fascinates me about the magic of
filmmaking, even when I didn't find the film all that magical itself.