Review: Titanic
It seems that Titanic has won more Oscars than any other film in history
with the exception of Ben Hur
Why?
Say what you like about Ben Hur, but it has class. Charlatan Heston's teeth
can act. When it comes over all awe-struck and serious, it's because something
genuinely awe-inspiring has happened—the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, for
example. There is too much hack religiosity, but the pious message at least
feels weighty enough to justify three and half hours in the cinema. When
Ben-Hur gives up being a Jewish Prince to become an Early Christian, one feels
something significant has occurred. And an awful lot happens on the way. I
don't only mean that you get a chariot race and a sea battle and a lot of sword
fights and a Roman triumph with a cast of thousands and the Crucifixion and the
Sermon on the mount. You also get several years of the guy's life—prince,
prisoner, slave, escaped slave, adopted Roman bigwig... If you are going to
make an epic this is the way to do it.
Titanic has only one awe-inspiring event, to wit, the sinking of the
Titanic. It's 'message' is superficial and insipid. Very little happens along
the way. It is soap opera dressed up as epic, and after three and half hours in
the cinema, I was left with an overwhelming sense of 'was that it?'
Since Star Wars the smart thing to say about any film you didn't like has
been 'It has great special effects.' I am not sure if this is true of Titanic.
The effects which are most obviously 'special' are on the whole, the ones which
don't work. The long shots of the up-ended ship; the pans along its side; the
first sighting of the iceberg—seem oddly artificial. But this doesn't matter,
because much of film is firmly in the Cecil B De-MIlle tradition. If you want
to show an army of ten thousand Egyptian slaves, hire ten thousand extras. If
you want to show the sinking of the Titanic, re-build the Titanic. So, I will
not insult James Cameron by saying that the film had good special effects; I
will say that it was a very impressive piece of historical reconstruction, and
a very dramatic spectacle.
Here is an excerpt from a review of Titanic posted to the web by someone who
prides himself on not being susceptible to hype:
'A movie of extraordinary vision, an experience so completely
engulfing and all consuming that hardened critics will leave the auditorium
openly weeping at the compassion, the humanity, the weakness and the majesty
that is presented in those fleeting hours.'
Here is one from a girl who saw it four times:
' Never before has a movie reached inside of me and hammered at
my heart the way this did...I hope that my floods of tears are justified in
that everybody who suffered on that dreadful day in 1912, can look down on us
from where ever they are and know that they will never be forgotten ...There is
no ship that can't be sunk, and there is no dream that can't be crushed. There
is only hope. Hope that something like this will never happen again. I could
watch this film over and over again and learn a new lesson from each viewing.
It's really the best film I have ever seen.'
I would have no problem with anyone who said 'The plot is tosh, of course:
but it's worth seeing for the spectacle.' But the people who admire—who
revere—Titanic seem actually to be responding to the storyline, not the
'special effects.'
I find this utterly inexplicable.
The plot of Titanic might, with a little padding, have been enough to
sustain a one-page weepy vignette in Woman's Realm. A feisty young lady, Rose
is pushed by her mother into marrying a rich cad, Cal. She meets a poor boy,
Jack, who truly loves her. At first, she follows her head and stays with the
cad; but then she chooses to follow her heart and go with the poor boy. He dies
saving her life. Eventually, and off stage, she falls in love again, marries,
lives a fulfilling life and dies at an advanced age. After she dies, she is
taken down one of those tunnels of light that all the fashionable near-death
experiences are wearing this year. In 'heaven' she is reunited with the poor
boy who saved her in life all those years ago (which must be rather galling for
her husband of forty or fifty years. )
Not one of the characters steps beyond their stereotype for one second of
the film. Cal would have been one-dimensional in a Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta. Billy Zane plays him like the Sheriff of Nottingham in Prince of
Theives, the baddie you love to hate. He sneers; he's a snob; he thinks that
wads of pound notes will make everyone do his bidding, he slaps Rose in the
face and says 'I forbid it!' a lot. When the boat is going down, he grabs a
random child in order to get onto a lifeboat. He does everything but twiddle
his moustache. There is not the remotest hint about why such a total bastard is
marrying a girl with no money; there is not the slightest suggestion that being
on sinking ship, a few seconds away from death might peel away the veneer or change
his outlook in any way.
Leonardo DiCaprio is that relatively unusual phenomenon, the film-icon who
can act. But he is not given much opportunity here. Jack is an orphaned Yank
who came to Europe so he can be a failed artist in Paris, which is dead
romantic. Very much the Post Fully Monty Hero: tough on the outside, teaching
Rose to spit like a man, but soft and sensitive on the inside, with a portfolio
of really good paintings. Cal is English and follows social conventions. Jack
is American and free and classless. He likes having no roots being the sort of
guy who just goes where life takes him I was born under a wandering star just
make every day count. Has anyone stopped to consider for one second the cynical
crowd-pleasing hypocrisy of spending a hundred million dollars on a movie which
takes it as read that the best way to be happy and fulfilled is to be poor?
Once the actual disaster starts, Jack turns into the last action hero,
instantly knowing which end of ship you have to be on during a disaster, taking
control of situations, and saying 'Rose do this, Rose do that, Rose do the
other' every five minutes.
Jack wins his ticket on the Titanic in a game of poker. He nearly misses the
trip, getting on board with only one minute to spare. As Jack clings to the
wreckage at the end of the film he says 'Winning that ticket was the best thing
which ever happened to me.' You see, it was three hours ago: we have to
reminded, so we can see that it was a significant moment. He goes on to promise
Rose that even if he dies, she will live a long life, have lots of babies, die
as an old lady. This is terribly clever, since we have already, in the framing
sequence, seen her as an old lady. Everything has to be explained, slowly: Jack
tries to find Rose in the First Class Chapel on Sunday Morning. Sure enough,
the congregation are belting out 'Hear us when we cry to thee for those in
peril on the sea.' You just couldn't bloody resist it, could you. Everything is
obvious, every thing explained, telegraphed and spoon-fed. God forbid that a
movie should ask us to think for ourselves.
There is no doubt that the second half of the film—after Titanic hits the
iceberg—is an improvement on the first. We no longer have to worry about
painfully stereotyped characters having painfully implausible conversations in
painfully contrived situations. We simply sit back and enjoy the fireworks.
There was one chunk, where Rose has to return to a waterlogged deck to rescue
Jack, who is handcuffed to a pipe (Cal having planted stolen goods on him)
which was genuinely claustrophobic and gripping. Let's face it, no-one does
chases along dark, water-filled corridors like James Cameron.
But we rapidly stop caring. Rosie and Jim are at the very front of the ship
when it goes tits up, so we get one of those vertiginous falling sequences as
the ship sinks. The visual vocabulary was the same as every other Hollywood
action movie: you might as well have been watching Jurassic Park. The real
world tragedy is simply a pretext to build the most expensive fairground ride
in history, across which the man of action and his bimbo can have chases and
falls, get trapped and escape, and get into and out of lifeboats so many times
that I totally lost track and didn't care.
The 'historical' side of things dissolves into a series of vignettes—Rose
and Jack's thrilling adventures are intercut with little bitty scenes about the
rest of the passengers and crew. Some of these I take to have been
historical—the Captain locking himself on the bridge; the crew not having the
faintest idea what the capacity of the lifeboats were; the 3rd class passengers
locked in until the first class ones are away. Some of the scenes were
reasonably affecting: the painfully Irish mother telling her children painfully
Irish folktales to comfort them; the drunken twits trying to die like
gentlemen.
The take on the Band was particularly nice. I had always pictured them down
in the ballroom, Playing On as if nothing was wrong. The film showed them up on
deck, playing popular tunes to keep morale up, and improvising 'Nearer My God
To Thee' as they split up to make for the life boats. Of course the hymn has to
be taken up by the score and turned into the incidental music.
And the ultimate message of the film? The humane, compassionate message that
leaves hardened critics weeping openly and has made one lady in America see it
150 times? If Jack had not won his game of poker, Rose would have married the
cad. He would have stopped her from being feisty, the fire would have gone out,
and Rose would have ceased to exist. Jack gives his life so Rose can carry on
being Rose, so she can live to be an old lady and have lots of children, a
career and a horse. To allow someone to do this is to save them 'in every way
possible'; to lose your independence is worse than dying. Being on the Titanic
was, in the long run, a good thing because of the opportunities it afforded for
growth and personal development. It was, in short, another bleeding therapy
movie: self-actualisation being the only religion of which Hollywood can
conceive, and settled domesticity the only happiness to which you, (as opposed
to us, the moguls) can aspire.
How can anyone possibly describe this piece of sub-standard melodrama as the
best film they have ever seen, a completely engulfing experience?
I have a theory
In the last decade, the Multiplex Movie has become completely divorced from
all normal cannons of story-telling. Movies do not contain characters; their
protagonists are large dumb objects: mental patients like Sigourney Weaver or
Batman; circus clowns like Jim Carey or Robin Williams. Or else they are
ironic, post-modern avatars for the audience who, by definition, do not take
the film seriously. Look at Will Smith in Men in Black or the entire cast of
Independence Day; they perpetually joke and undercut the action because they,
like you recognise that it is cobblers. The mere fact that Titanic contains
characters—actual, human characters, not a cartoon robot with a large
gun—strikes Multiplex Man as an unutterable novelty.
Multiplex Movies have also largely abandoned plot in favour of big kinetic
sensory films which you can't possibly do on television. This is why people
often wait for the video to come out. They are often full of jokes at their own
expense. Mars Attacks was a parody of Independence Day, itself a parody of
1950s UFO movies, which weren't very sensible to start with. About the only
interesting thing Jurassic Park II was the way it sent up other dinosaur
movies—Godzilla, Valley of Gwangi and, of course, Jurassic Park I. At worst (as
in the embarrassingly bad Batman series) there is simply no attempt to provide
links between scenes: the characters simply lumber from one implausible
set-piece to the next. Provided a lot is happening on the screen; the audience
will never be bored; provided the audience is never bored, they will buy the
tee-shirt—-which is the main object of the exercise, after all. Again, the mere
fact that Titanic has a plot, with a beginning, a middle and an end, with the
final scene resolving the opening scene, and no loopholes left for a sequel or
a cartoon series—may seem magnificently engrossing if the last thing you saw
was Alien III. If you have never experienced anything but Saturday morning
cartoons, then Neighbours may well seem to be the height of drama.
That's my theory. Conspiratorial, sure; slightly snobbish and with a whiff
of fogeyism, that I freely admit. But the only other one which springs to mind
is just too depressing.
Once you have spent $100,000,000 on something, everyone will praise it, and no-one will tell you that it doesn't have enough lifeboats.