TITANIC (1997)

Ira says

Rose: “You’re distracting me. Go away.”
Jack: “I cant. I’m involved now.”

Now, I couldn’t help noticing that I was getting a little distracted by the fact that I somehow wasn’t enjoying James Cameron’s TITANIC, (winner of 11 academy awards), as much as I did the first time, but that I was still involved, all over again. Much of that involvement began around the above point in the narrative and I must admit that I did feel a little tingle of delight watching the young, so very much alive and vibrant Kate Winslett & Leonardo Di Caprio (for me, by far the best thing about the film, yes even more than the scale of it all) playfully battling it out. Act 1 is for the lovebirds, theirs to shine in and win you over, and they do and Act 2 feels almost like a different film where Cameron invests his magnificent detailing and attention to the tragedy itself. Around the halfway point, while watching it this time around, I must also admit I was first film critic, second lay viewer but I also couldn’t help noticing that my 89-year-old grandmother, (who remembered the flow of events in the story even better than me) kept insisting that we don’t take a break, a home-DVD- intermission, for dinner. “I’ll have it here?” she said gently but firmly, with a little twinkle in her eye. Even though it was way past her bedtime already.

To me, that scene above where Rose and Jack first meet, with its cheekiness and romance, its Cameron-esque drama and hints of that wild, crazy, passionate love you think exists only in the movies (call me a hopeless so-and-so, but I still believe it does in ‘real’ life too) is one of the most memorable in the film. (Hell, those one-liners about being ‘involved’ or the related ‘you jump, I jump’ are now historically amongst those charming, witty, famous, Hollywood movie, love moments that came way before the ‘You had me at Hello’s’ of the world. No offence Jerry McGuire.)

More than the image of them at the stern flying across the ocean, more than the breathless abandon of them dancing in a frenzy of beer induced merriment on the wooden floors of the lower decks of the ship, (one of the few places in act 1where Cameron lets his frames get crowded, suggestive of the far from cheerful, more deathly, larger crowds that would fill his frames later), more than the unforgettable portrait scene (well done debuting Winslett for your sheer confidence with the nudity and that ethereal face), and even more than the final tableau of them, blue lipped and frozen on that wooden raft. The humor, romance, innocence, suspense, mystery and tragedy are all there in that very first encounter as Jack stumbles on Rose as she tethers on the ships rear end, dangerously facing the open ocean. In the way he impishly, cleverly talks her out of committing suicide, holds her in a first-touch, eyes-meet moment, is then as unexpectedly and swiftly ambushed by the wealthy ‘other man’, and left alone with an invitation to a high class dinner he’s never been to before and a woman who’s way out of his league. Trust Mr. Cameron’s storytelling to give one of the world’s greatest naval tragedies an overwhelming wave of emotional melodrama and the passion of love at its pivotal centre. Titanic would be merely spectacle without Kate & Leo and I mean Kate & Leo, not Rose & Jack.

James Cameron has a way with the heart, hell he has a way with getting into yours and when he got his leading pair right, that’s half the battle. But I noticed something else pretty glaringly this time around. (And no I haven’t seen the film twenty times; this was my third, the second being in parts, on cable TV a few years ago). The writing isn’t brilliant. Its repetitive and often clichéd. I believe in subtle foreshadowing but how many times do different characters have to spell out how large and vast and grand the ship is? While that first wide shot of the ship cruising past a sailboat was great to give us an idea of relative size, did we need to ruin the moment when Leo watches dolphins racing along with the ship at its stern by cutting to another wide there? The ship’s big, guys. Did you get that? While Leo and Kate (just saying them now is like saying Sonny and Cher, or Rogers and Astaire, its amazing) are just way too natural as actors to make those romantic soft focus moments come off as cheesy, the writing tends to slip into sentimentalism, melodrama, and indulgent stereotypes. Think dominating husband to be, evil, controlling mother, spies, benevolent well-wishers, villainous valets, the hoity-toity upper class and the looked down upon lower rungs, including the new money, the nouveau riche, epitomized by ‘Molly the unsinkable’ played by Kathy Bates the unsinkable. (Molly remains one of my personal favorite supporting characters). Cameron, using his commercial smarts yet again, gets his story after all, from a forgotten, secondary strand of the original black and white version where the focus is on an older couple and the lack of fluff. In the 1992 version, it’s the classic rich girl, poor boy scenario, complete with all the elements of a romantic saga- a tale of enduring love and a Ship of Dreams.

And what you can’t ignore is that TITANIC is the stuff and the movie of dreams. I remember watching it with a group of dizzy, shrieking 17 year olds when I was 17 and being wow-ed. It was an after school trip to the theatre in school uniforms, with wide eyes and lots of popcorn, an adventure, with a tangible, palpable excitement to see the film the world was talking about, and to discover who the blue eyed wonder was who was stealing hearts as he claimed himself the ‘king of the world’. You’ve got to hand it to Cameron, he certainly knows how to make the world talk, how to set the bar for visual technique and achievement, and he certainly knows how to entertain. First Titanic created Academy history (decades after Ben Hur) and now Avatar and Pandora are transporting audiences into an alternative 3d universe in theatres across the world. Notice anything in common, it’s the love, baby. “I can see people”, Jack tells Rose at one point, talking about his ability to do portraits and capture a persons essence on his canvas, an idea ironically (or deliberately?) Cameron would later go on to link with love in Avatar. “I see you”. Um, ok, I see you, do you see me?

The truth is, love it, hate it, condemn it as mush or gimmickry, Cameron can ‘see’ what audiences want. With Titanic, he had history on his side, everyone’s a sucker for a well told ‘true story’ that’s tragic and epic in proportions. Titanic is also the film that launched the careers of 2 of Hollywood’s current finest actors, and at the time it was made, it had the power packed, blockbuster, and super sized (because with Cameron, most things are) ingredients of a WINNER. Think opulent sets, meticulous costumes, the extravagant production design, memorable music, dazzling visual effects, the length, the scale, the universal appeal- Titanic is a saga, and its cheesy, and its long, and it almost feels dated next to AVATAR, but you know what? Right at the beginning, when that underwater machine finds its way into the great ships recesses, thousands of miles beneath the surface of the ocean, and you see images of it in faded out ruin, you actually get flashes of the splendor of the very same ship Cameron creates for us in his film- and that my friends is what moviemaking, magic, awe, drama, spectacle, call it what you like, is all about. So, going back to my grandmother who stayed up till almost 1 a.m watching, I give the man credit for making young, old, black, white, brown, man, or woman, FEEL it. However briefly or momentarily, emotionally, TITANIC gets you. (But if I hear the theme song ‘My heart will go on’ one more time I think I will barf and I still think its ridiculous a12 ANGRY MEN is below a TITANIC on the AFI. Watch this space.)

In a humorous moment early on in the film, a paranoid Hopper watches Askew filling gasoline in their chopper and frets to Fonda about how their lives biggest earnings are at the mercy of a ‘stranger filling gasoline maaan’. A brief silence follows, and then Fonda pats him and says quietly, “Everything’s fine Billy.” At that point, don’t ask why, a tiny voice in my head was saying that nothing could be further from the truth. The single, last spoken line of the film rings in my ears even now, because the fate of these men, their journey and the condition of that time in American socio-cultural history boils down to the fact that maybe, just maybe if freedom isn’t what Billy, or Captain America or George Hansen or all the hippies praying for their supper stood for, if only Billy had got a haircut, things would’ve been different. As relevant today, in any part of the world, Easy Rider is not just a cult road, drug and buddy movie, but a thought-provoking coming of age socio-cultural human drama.

Neha says

Meet James Cameron (True Lies, Terminator 2, Titanic, Avatar), the man with the Midas touch who can bellow from the rooftops “I’m the king of the world” or more aptly “I’m the King of the box office.” First it was Titanic, the most expensive film back then ($200 million) and the highest grosser in the U.S. ($ 600,743,440) only to be superseded by his next outing that came over a decade later- Avatar. But let me just say, after revisiting Titanic, I was surprised to draw uncanny parallels between the two. It’s all about first painstakingly creating a world that seduces you, be it Pandora with its surreal, exotic, neon-lit detailing or aboard RMS Titanic, where luxury, scale and the grandeur of the Victorian era overwhelms. Then it’s about destroying that very labor of love-We saw the Terminator machines do that for Pandora and here in Titanic, a collision with an iceberg captures in real time death, devastation and the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic. In Avatar, the human’s were chasing after a piece of invaluable, life-saving metal and in Titanic the inciting incident is the search for a priceless diamond called the “heart of the ocean.” Both have love stories at its centre-but Titanic has the winning Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet chemistry to give it an edge in the romance department. Both films seem obsessed with themes of freedom, man verses nature and the counter productivity of greed and arrogance. And the big one- both in their own place and time stand out for their technical achievements that have left us, even the most cynical of us, awe-inspiringly ogling over the visuals and effects.

Titanic is a Romeo and Juliet tragic love story aboard a gigantic ship that uses the true story of a ship wreck and its Victorian era to add color, culture and character to a melodramatic saga of love first found and then lost. Our hero Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a free-spirited bloke and our heroine Rose (Kate Winslet) a sad, society girl who is arranged to be married to a vane and vindictive Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). Rose feels trapped in this superficial Page 3 kind of world of propriety and old money and tries to commit suicide. Of course Jack comes to the rescue. They fall in love etc etc etc.

The meticulous detailing that’s really become a high point of Cameron’s films is in vivid display as is his flair for the melodramatic. Come to think of it since everything is so larger than life, the silly stuff gets really silly; the melodramatic put my gag reflex in overdrive like the scene with the two lovebirds trying to jump onto a single plank of wood. Clearly it couldn’t take both their weight but Jack, did you have to play martyr in the water? Couldn’t you grab something else to stay afloat? Or the stupidity of a band of musicians playing their violins when the ship is coming apart and people are dying... Really Cameron was it necessary? But credit to Cameron he still has you glued to the screen with the “wow” elements seeming even more brilliant in this overblown world. From the time the Captain is informed that the ship has an hour, maximum two to sink, the film commits itself to giving us a moment by moment, real time account of the tragedy. The sinking of the ship is symbolic of an end of an era and with a combination of CGI and set pieces each moment from the iceberg scrape to the ship’s mechanics and mathematics to the inroads of water into each deck starting from the bottom up to the devastation and the rescue operation to the heart stopping moment when the ship splits in two and turns to a vertical position and goes under...it’s all there and no allowances have been made.

Rose’s character and arc, everything she say’s and does underscores the film’s attempt to capture the period, the role of the “female” in a chauvinistic society and the claustrophobia of feeling trapped. Be it the postcard moment of her and Jack at the ship’s edge with their arms outstretched to a Celine Deon soundtrack or her decision to pose nude for him. It’s interesting that she wanted to pose with the diamond around the neck. It feels like she wanted to capture for time immemorial both the weight of a suffocating past and the beauty of her spirit’s liberation. It’s this charcoal picture that pops up time and again in the narrative that reminds us of that personal conflict and her triumph. And even if we were to look at it more broadly- the voyage itself from the time Kate calls the Titanic a slave pen to the Statue of Liberty becomes another running metaphor of her journey to freedom. So it comes as no surprise that Rose played with both innocence and resilience by a charming Kate Winslet (even if she is a tad podgy) outshines many in the film.

Even with the “Oh no” sequences on offer, I have to say there were many “Oh yes” trance inducing visual and emotional moments as well. On the one end its too darn long; it gets a little indulgent with overlong scenes that don’t push the story forward and the dialogues are soap opera worthy but then at the other end of the spectrum the sheer size and the aspirational quality of the universe he creates pulls you right in, making you a part of that experience and period.