70. Titanic (1997)

Plot Intro

Penniless American Jack Dawson (Leonardo Di Caprio) and upper-class semi-American Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) both board the cruise ship Titanic in Southhampton, 1912. Rose and her mother (Frances Fisher) have been left many debts by the death of Rose’s father, therefore Rose is engaged to marry rich prick, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). But she hates him, and her lifestyle, and starts falling in love with Jack, despite Cal’s machinations against him. Oh, and the Titanic wallops into an iceberg. 

Paul says...

Oh, we’ve been looking forward to this one for quite some time. There aren’t many films where you can learn history whilst sobbing to a Celine Dion song on repeat. Titanic was a stupendous hit and remains a firm favourite amongst, well, pretty much everyone. It equalised Ben Hur’s record of 11 Oscar wins (a record that will be equalised again by The Lord of the Rings, but has not yet been surpassed). It is the second-highest grossing film of all time before adjusting for inflation, right behind James Cameron’s other colossal hit, Avatar. After adjusting for inflation, it’s the third-highest. It’s arguably one of the biggest, most exhilarating, most emotional Best Picture winners ever.

But is it flawless? No, I wouldn’t say so. But hear me out before you throw your Celine CD’s at me. James Cameron is not known for nuanced films - after all, this is the man who turned Alien and Terminator into action-adventure franchises rather than low-budget stand-alone thrillers. And Titanic suffers from probably the most superficial characterisation I’ve ever seen. Every upper-class person has a well-maintained sneer and says things like “This ship can’t possibly sink” and “That Picasso will amount to nothing”, while every third-class passenger has gained Essential Life Skills from the School of Life, such as right hooks, arm wrestling, chugging pints of Guinness and being nice to people. There is not so much a fine line between good and bad people, more like an unbreakable Berlin Wall. And the dire script is peppered with atrocious lines - my favourite is Rose’s “I saw the iceberg…and I see it in your eyes”. 

What disguises these horrendous faults, is the acting, especially from Di Caprio and Winslet. Both so young and fresh in 1997, they make their torrid and trite love affair seem natural, spontaneous and adorable, rendering the actual sinking extremely tense and tragic because we genuinely want them to survive and triumph. It’s easy to see why both of them have gone on to have outstanding Oscar-winning careers.

The second half of the film is what obviously won so much well-deserved praise. What I love most about this re-enacted sinking is how many aspects of life on the Titanic are explored. Memorable scenes such as the band playing continuously during the sinking; small scenes in the gym, the engine rooms and the chapel; historical touches such as the death of Captain Smith and Ismay’s controversial escape from death. All of these work together to show a forgotten and sometimes mind-boggling lifestyle with lavish detail. 

Plus the special effects have barely aged over the last 22 years. Cameron does what every great blockbuster of the 90s and early 00’s does- he presents the events not just with a sense of horror but with a sense of awe and wonder too. The film taps into just how huge, devastating and terrifying the sinking of the Titanic was, as we see it through the eyes of the poor victims on board, and the lucky survivors in the lifeboats. 

It’s true that Titanic is a film that won its accolades because, quite frankly, it’s easy viewing. But that doesn’t mean it deserves a low grade. In fact, it deserves a huge amount of praise for its historical research, a storyline that will have the most toxically masculine of people sobbing into their Kleenex, and some of the most memorable and euphoric viewing I’ve had during this entire project.

Highlight

Celine Dion’s key change.

Lowlight

A toss-up between Billy Zane’s sneery, slimey pantomime villain (some subtlety is okay, Mr Cameron!) and the horrendous racial stereotypes that will have Irish and Italian people rolling their eyes. 

Mark

9/10

Doug says...

It’s hard to judge a film like Titanic when it’s already carrying so much emotional weight. This is the first film of this entire project that I have grown up with. It’s like asking me to point out the flaws in Disney’s Aladdin. I simply don’t want to. It is a film I love, and have loved through my childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, and I don’t want to find gaping holes and issues on a closer inspection. 

However, reader, I did it for you. Preparing to watch it again, I readied myself for disappointment, and even distaste. Luckily for me, this is still a wonderful, soaring and momentous piece of cinema that manages to make every moment of its three hours and fifteen minutes count. 

What James Cameron does so deftly is he builds up the romance of Jack and Rose to a point where we want them to succeed, using the class systems that are so prevalent on the Titanic as a backdrop, and then switches it abruptly when the ship hits the iceberg. What’s noticeable is that after spending almost every moment with DiCaprio and Winslet for the first hour, we suddenly go for broad stretches without seeing them at all. The background characters such as the Irish mum with her children and the ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’ get given equal screentime, allowing us to see the disaster’s effects all over the ship and in the lifeboats. 

Cameron enacts this brilliantly. We see the cheerful woman who was dancing in the third class party now clinging bitterly to the back of the ship as it rises up and out of the water, before catching Rose’s eye and letting go, falling to her death. It’s the stuff of theatre directing - ensuring each tiny and large role have their own narrative throughout the piece, so that there’s a sense of reality to it at all times. 

The acting is, as Paul says, superb. But I disagree about the script. Yes there are some ‘90s clunkers, but there’s some great lines in there too. Most of them, however, are delivered by - in my eyes - the strongest actor in there: Gloria Stuart as Old Rose. Stuart is dynamite, serving wry sanguinity with a hint of cheek, and then really hitting every emotional note in her recounting of the disaster. She takes the unsubtle script and imbues it with subtlety - ‘the crash of ’29 hit him hard and he put a pistol in his mouth later that year - or so I read,’ tells you instantly of her removal from the obscene wealth and boredom of those classes. Stuart was nominated for an Oscar and won a host of other trophies for her performance. 

But what I most admire about this film is the way the myths and legends from Titanic are woven together. During the sinking of the ship, so many of the moments that have gone down in legend are brought to life - Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet putting on their dress suits and sipping whiskey while saying ‘we are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen’, an officer shooting a passenger and then committing suicide, Ida and Isidor Straus dying together in their bedroom as she would not go without him. Cameron adds in additional ones, giving voice to the previously mute third classes, we see the Irish mum telling her children a fairytale as the water seeps in under the door, and the ill-fated Fabrizio crushed by a falling pillar. To misquote Whitney Houston -  it’s not subtle, but it’s okay. 

Highlight

Stuart’s line-reading of ‘Afterward, the seven hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait: wait to die, wait to live, wait for an absolution that would never come’ as the camera slowly fades to images of passengers wrapped in their furs, shell-shocked, bobbing in the pitch-black sea is just Art. 

Lowlight

The romance at the beginning does pall a little in comparison to the full scale of humanity explored in the second half. But Winslet and DiCaprio make it work.

Mark

10/10. An iconic movie. 

69. The English Patient (1996)

Plot Intro

A French-Canadian nurse in WW2 named Hana (Juliette Binoche) is tasked with caring for a dying patient suffering from severe burns after a plane crash (Ralph Fiennes). As they live together in an abandoned Italian monastery, the mysterious patient begins to reveal the story of his injuries, and details his tumultuous romance with a married woman named Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) while fending off a vengeful spy (Willem Dafoe). 

Doug says...

I came to this without very high expectations, having tried unsuccessfully to plough through the novel a few years ago. The experience of watching it was then made more difficult by the lack of subtitles (why on earth a film made in 1996 doesn’t have subtitles on the DVD is beyond me). So I’d be forgiven for not getting much from this film. 

Except that it is actually a beautiful, powerful, aching work that doesn’t need every line to be heard. That’s right, reader - I loved it. 

The performances are fine, Ralph Fiennes does well as the slightly odd, dashing leading man while Kristin Scott Thomas takes on her usual role as Upper Crust British Lady with aplomb. There’s also strong support from Juliette Binoche (who nabbed best supporting actress for this) and Willem Dafoe as a suspicious hanger-on. I particularly liked Naveen Andrews as Kip who managed to bring real tension to his bomb-defusing scenes. 

But the real success of this film belongs to the direction and cinematography (hence why Anthony Minghella took both Best Director and Best Film). It is ravishing. It recalls previous winner Gandhi and 2019 nominee Roma in how utterly beautiful it is. Minghella takes the ordinary moments and makes them arresting, whether it’s planes flying against the endless dunes of the desert, cars buried in sandstorms, or the flashing lights on a rickety train throwing a nurse’s silhouette into sharp relief. There isn’t a trick missed in seizing the moment. 

It’s noticeable in the way Minghella uses these moments to echo the love-story at the heart of it. As the two lovers grow closer while they’re trapped in the desert, the light from pink emergency flares shimmers across their hopeful faces. In the crucial plane crash, Katherine sits erect in the wreckage, despite the angle of the plane, and then - carried by the Count over the deserts - her scarf flies out behind, caught by the wind. In the present day, Kip uses aerial wires to lift Hana into the height of the church so she can see the frescoes. As she swirls around the paintings, the flare she holds to see flickers and smokes, so we see the joyous Hana in the midsts of paintings, light and smoke. It’s utter theatricality made bespoke for cinema. 

It’s a film of beauty, and it’s just wonderful to watch how Minghella uses the art of cinema to accentuate his points. The flickering painted caves contrast with the steady blue tones of the hotel where they finally sleep together. There are so many images and moments to talk about - but ultimately, it’s easiest just to say this is a work of art. 

Highlight 

I think my ultimate favourite imagery was of the planes flying high. There was such a sense of freedom, always tempered by the clear danger of the desert. 

Lowlight

The final half hour does start to drag, but then again that’s when there’s most dialogue so I felt behind. A second watch on a version with subtitles might change my mind…

Mark 

9/10

Paul says...

For me, The English Patient is an example of melodrama at its most turgid and self-righteous. Yes, reader, unlike Doug, I didn’t like it!

I agree that the film is stunning to look at. The opening shots of the desert in Northern Africa immediately evoked fond memories of Lawrence of Arabia and, indeed, the desert has the same element of menace and danger that David Lean created in the 1962 epic. The cinematography during the scenes in Italy also create feelings of serenity and lethargy that contrast well with the comparative chaos of the flashback scenes. There’s a real sense that the drama and conflict was long ago and far away, and that Almasy, the patient of the title, has finally reached the peaceful end of his twisty-turny road. 

But I struggled with the story. For starters, Almasy and Katherine’s fling is signposted so obviously that they might as well have neon signs above their heads screaming “We’re gonna shag soon!” The first time we meet Katherine, she tells a story from Herodotus about a Queen who is seen naked by a common man. The man then has to kill the King and marry the Queen to save her honour. She narrates this whilst staring wistfully at her husband and her future lover. Ooh, I wonder what could possibly happen?! Tales from ancient history, myth and folklore crop up at other times in the film, and they’re designed to augment the action but their parallels with the film’s events are so blindingly stark that it’s almost laughable. 

The storyline is not just predictable, it’s downright simple. Far too simple for a film that steers dangerously close to surpassing 2.5 hours. The film sets up a degree of mystery around the patient suffering from memory loss, gradually remembering the events that led him to this point, but the crux of it all turns out to be his affair with Katherine. There are side-plots but, for me, they didn’t benefit the main action. For example, Hana’s relationship with Kip (played by the dishy Naveen Andrews who readers may recognise as Syed from Lost) is sweet but inconsequential. And I did not get the significance of Willem Dafoe’s character. Caravaggio enters the action convinced that Almasy is responsible for his capture and torture by Nazis, but it seemed obvious to me that this is not the case. And when Almasy does describe the truth of what happened, Caravaggio’s accusations aren’t revisited. Nor is his character really completed. I still don’t quite get what his role was meant to be in the action.

Despite these, I concede to the fact that The English Patient has some lovely acting. Fiennes is as intense and attractive in a “I really fancy him but I shouldn’t” way as he was in Schindler’s List; Juliette Binoche is very engaging (she nabbed Best Supporting Actress for this); and the ever-charismatic Kristin Scott Thomas really knows how to dominate a scene. 

But this wasn’t enough to counteract what was, for me, an overlong and un-engaging tale with the sort of huge landscapes and tragic deaths that '90s audiences evidently lived for. Usually I’m a sucker for films such as these but, and I never thought I’d say this, Braveheart did it better.

Highlight

The scene in which Kip (Naveen Andrews) is desperately trying to defuse a bomb whilst a tank full of drunk, revelling soldiers runs the risk of setting the bomb off is pretty terrifying. My heart skipped a few beats at that point.

Lowlight

Willem Dafoe’s entire storyline needed more relevance to the central plot. Or written out entirely.

Mark

3/10

68. Braveheart (1995)

Plot Intro

Scottish farmer William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is naturally miffed when the English King Edward (Patrick McGoohan) oppresses his people, kills his father and brother in battle, and the English soldier murder his wife (Catherine McCormack). So he assembles a huge number of clans and allies to rebel against the English oppressors. And has an affair with Isabella of France (Sophie Marceau) apparently.

Paul says...

Here’s a film that could potentially be the sole motivator for the Scottish independence referendum. In this rugged, fog-filtered world, every English person is a snarling, moustache-twirling, tie-the-heroine-to-the-railway-tracks villain. Granted, the English don’t behave well historically, but this film, like many '90s period dramas, reduces history to such an easy divide between good and bad that it comes across as ridiculous.

But also, it comes across as fabulously entertaining. I know Braveheart is lambasted frequently for being an undeserving winner, and to be fair it did beat Apollo 13 and Sense and Sensibility. But it does manage to fill up its near-three hours with an enormous amount of rousing battle scenes, murders, affairs, injustices and vengeances. The idea of Isabella of France (the future Queen of England) being able to sneak away from her many, many servants to have a covert affair with a Scottish rebel living in the wild, and apparently become the mother of his children and therefore the mother of all later English royals, is not only preposterous, we know it’s just not true. But without plot elements this ludicrous, this film would be the sort of dry, lifeless drone that is more associated with the '80s (i.e. Out of Africa). If you like Game of Thrones, then just wait till you get a load of this.

The battle scenes are extremely exciting- they’re shot coherently so that I understood what was going on, and they even build and climax like miniature stories in themselves. Gibson, who won Best Director for this, manages to capture the violence, terror and also the adrenaline of these scenes and I remember wishing that I could go back in time just to watch a real one (not to partake of course). 

I also didn’t think Gibson was all that bad as Wallace. He’s fun and lively, he has great hair and arms that he uses to their greatest potential, and his accent is far from terrible. And Patrick McGoohan is having a great time as that dastardly king- he even rolls his R’s like a pantomime villain. Unfortunately, Sophie Marceau gets little to do other than wear beautiful dresses and do the single-tear cry every now and then, so suffice to say this film is not doing much for the representation of women in cinema.

The third and final hour of the film takes something of a nosedive, which is a let-down after the magnificent pace and action of the first two. The film climaxes with its second battle-scene, and then transforms into a series of epilogues that we didn’t really need (Wallace’s eventual execution, his impregnation of Isabella of France, Robert Bruce betraying him then un-betraying him for obscure and uninteresting reasons). This section could have been easily chopped down, although I think it was fashionable to extend period dramas beyond 2.5 hours at the time, regardless of their quality.

So, to briefly conclude. Is Braveheart Oscar-worthy? Lord, no. Would I watch it again? Probably not. Was I entertained? Hell, yes. This is an example of how rousing, rambunctious story-telling can surpass the need for historical accuracy. If you want to learn more about the real Wallace, read Wikipedia instead.

Highlight

The battle scenes are worth watching on their own - particularly the second one in which King Edward’s nefarious schemes are revealed with excellent relish.

Lowlight

Wallace’s execution did not need the length of time it is given. Bearing in mind he got hung, drawn and quartered, the scene is surprisingly lacking in punch. 

Mark

8/10

Doug says...

This is a hilarious film. The problem is that most of the comedy isn’t probably intended. For instance, when William Wallace (Gibson) is being choked by a rope, he does a very odd bit of acting that comes across like a strange impression of a frog. This impression had both me and our viewing guest Natalie in peals of laughter. 

In another scene, the villainous English king throws his son’s male lover out of the window. This is also so overblown that it becomes hilarious. The writer of the film was apparently bemused as to why this scene got some of the biggest laughs of the night from cinema audiences. I, however, am not. This film is bizarre. William Wallace is the only character in the whole film to wear a vest (presumably to flash his biceps), the fighting soldiers’ woad war paint is applied as if they’re off to the football, and don’t get me started on how the Princess sneakily shags Wallace and then gets pregnant. If this film wanted to be taken seriously, then it would actually be suggesting that the entire line of Kings after Edward II through to Richard III were all descended from William Wallace. It’s fictional, but boy is it ambitious. 

This film is ridiculous. It’s entertaining, but it’s distracting in how utterly mental it is. The bravado of the writing in eschewing pretty much every historical fact in the name of dramatic license is breathtaking. Suddenly Robert the Bruce’s dad is a traitorous leper, while Robert’s own betrayal of Wallace is the catalyst for Wallace’s own capture. None of this is in anyway true. And while I’ve defended some dramatic licence recently in the name of good theatre (Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book), this film really pushes my patience. 

This aside, there’s a lot of battle scenes that are well done but battle scenes just aren’t my thing. Our guest Natalie also pointed out that it fails so miserably at the Bechdel Test that not only are there no scenes with two women discussing anything other than men, there’s actually barely a scene with two women in it. The ‘main’ woman exists merely for Mel Gibson to fawn over, while the Princess’s handmaiden makes bizarrely placed references to sexual acts. I left this film a tad bemused. 

Final sum up: Entertaining? Yes. Is Mel Gibson hot? Fairly. Is this in any way Oscar worthy? Not in the slightest. Thank God Emma Thompson got the Oscar for Best Screenplay, because Sense and Sensibility was robbed.

Highlight

The sheer audacity of the writer in ignoring almost every historical fact was somehow delightful. 

Lowlight

The last hour of the film does drag, and Mel Gibson’s death scene is so overdone that it becomes very very funny. 

Mark

5/10