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.
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
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.
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