Titanic

THE SCOOP
Director: James Cameron
Plot: Fictional romantic tale of a rich girl and poor boy who meet on the ill-fated voyage of the 'unsinkable' ship.

Genre: Drama/Romance
Awards: Won 11 Oscars - best picture, director, editing, cinematography, art direction, costume design, original score, song, sound, sound editing, visual effects. Nom. for 3 Oscars - lead actress, sup. actress, makeup.
Runtime: 194min
Rating: NC16 for disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language.

IN RETROSPECT
Director James Cameron's most ambitious film to date. Titanic is an immense production costing over US$ 200 million, but deservedly won an astonishing eleven Oscars out of fourteen nominations. Reaping more than a billion bucks worldwide (excluding DVD sales), the historical sinking ship has certainly strike a chord with many. Titanic is almost flawless, intelligently constructed, and a remarkable motion picture altogether, considering the technical difficulties associated with producing such features.

Although it's a fictionalized tale of two lovers set in the backdrop of the unsinkable ship, the star of the show is Titanic herself. Eclipsing the dramatic performances displayed by the leading cast of a young Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet, the visual effects, and sound are the ones that steal the limelight. Ultimately, CGI technology can only help a film so much, so this is where Cameron lends his magical storytelling touch to it. He tells the story in a delicate manner, slowly through flashbacks, developing the main characters to the extent that they are realistically portrayed, and emotionally attached to us.

How Titanic actually sank, we do not know. But Cameron gives us his haunting vision of that fateful early morning in incredible detail. We know part of it is made up, but we are so overwhelmed by what we're experiencing that most of us would be just happy to be resigned to the task of admiring the picture, rather than dwelling on historical inaccuracies. Titanic will please most Cameron fans, whom are used to his sci-fi thrillers such as Aliens, and The Terminator. This is not his most intense work, but it's a brilliant addition to his resume. Welcome aboard!

SCORE: 9.5/10
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Last updated: 2010-05-20 06:29:09 by eternality_tan

Someday they’ll make a movie about the making of Titanic; an epic story of love and disaster, with an ice-berg called James Cameron and two plucky leads named Kate and Leo. Audiences will gasp at the scale of hubris involved in making a two hundred million dollar movie – and thrill to watch Kate and Leo battle ice-berg Cameron… braving PCP in the clam chowder, sub-zero waters and the shoot to end all careers! The movie will have a happy ending; Kate and Leo survive. But what will future audiences make of us – their forebears – will they grasp why we loved this movie so?

For the first hour and a half it’s a costume drama. Kate is an about-to-combust debutante and Leo is the sexiest man in steerage. They meet because she’s about to kill herself. The claustrophobic stuffiness of moneyed life has pushed Kate to the brink. Leo has seen her on deck a scene before, but it’s when she’s dangling from the railings that he spies his best opportunity. He catches Kate just as she slips, and for the next two hours they’re inseparable. Neither the greatest maritime catastrophe in history, nor Billy Zane’s moustache-twirling villainy can rend them asunder. Shame the ship doesn’t have a Leo-boat to come to its rescue.

James Cameron’s screenplay is so water-tight in its construction he presumably felt dialogue and characterisation were superfluous. There are lines people are asked to speak which no sentient human being would ever utter. The depiction of the Irish steerage passengers is so stereotypical it’s a wonder they don’t choke on four leaf clovers. Nothing really matters to Cameron except that the story keeps moving. His mission: set out the geography of the ship, get Leo and Kate together, have Leo and Kate run the length of the ship; watch the ship sink. Tragic teen-heartthrob romance: check. Gargantuan special-effects orgy: double check.

Leo is still stick-thin in Titanic and right at the apex of his sex-appeal. He looks like the essence of every boy who ever scaled a trellis to reach a girl’s window. His face is just peeking over the edge of adolescence. No young girl’s heart would have a prayer. As written, his character is the perfect mix of quixotic daring and orphan vulnerability. He’s a Jack London type-of-guy, rootless as a sack of potatoes, driven as lightning. Like every hero since being-of-noble-birth went out of fashion, his quest is to out-manoeuvre the higher-ups. Kate loves him because she knows he hasn’t planned anything. Their marriage would last about a day.

Kate has the more difficult role because she has to be loved by Leo – which means every woman in the audience is thinking: why her? If Cameron had picked Gwyneth Paltrow (and he was thinking about it), the movie would have died (because no woman on earth is going to root for Gwyneth Paltrow). But Kate is a different proposition. She looks like someone with an interior life, someone with struggles. Her character has to be someone who’d rather jump off a ship than sit quiet and let her husband make the decisions, and with Kate: you believe it. She spits vivacity. When she hauls Leo into the back of a car to deflower him (and it’s definitely played that way around) he’s the one who’s nervous.

People just needed an epic love story. That’s the simple explanation for the Titanic phenomenon. That, and Leo-mania. And James Cameron’s enduring luck. Nowadays, people can deny they liked it. We can all claim Vichy-France amnesia and say it was others who approved. But you and I know we were there, willing a two hundred million dollar underdog to prevail. It was the spirit of the times: pre-millennium fever. Y2K – the end of the world – remember that? TheTitanic story seemed in keeping with the Nineties: a great over-rated ship in distress. We thought 2000 was going to be our Year Zane. No wonder we plumped for Leo.

(This review will not try to avoid spoilers, so SPOILER WARNING if you haven’t seen Titanic, which is to say, if you do not live on planet Earth)

A successful story, in any storytelling media, is not the same as a good story. “Twilight” is undeniably a successful novel. Three chapters in, I wanted to cut my carotid open. “Transformers” is an undeniably successful film. And it’s also a badly-directed, over-cut, loud and stupid piece of shit.

It had been a while since I’ve watched “Titanic”. Hell, I think I was a teenager last time I did, and I was only seven years old when the movie was released to overwhelming success. I would watch it years later. My young impressions of the film were very positive, but I’m not the person I was years ago (thankfully), so I decided to watch it again to determine whether or not, from my point of view, this film deserved the success it got. And also because I’ve been hearing a lot of people say, “I don’t like Titanic” or using the film as proof that James Cameron’s next project, “Avatar”, will suck.

The verdict is that, once again, James Cameron’s film immersed me completely in its admittedly conventional but incredibly compelling love story, which is vital in creating a connection between the viewer and the death of 1500 people in the real life tragedy of the Titanic. Fuck yes it deserved the success it got. It’s a painstakingly researched, passionately crafted film, with the dedication of Cameron and his crew displayed in every frame. It’s also surprisingly humorous, achieving an amazing emotional balance, something made much more challenging by the sheer scale of the story.

It’s pretty much futile to complain about the unidimensional nature of some of the characters, because that was the point. One thing I love about this film is how relentlessly it satirizes aristocracy, and to achieve this effect, it’s no wonder Rose’s family are absurdly stuck-up and snotty. This leads to several priceless moments throughout the film, and makes the contrast between Jack and them (when they’re all sitting on the same dinner table) even stronger. And let’s not forget: we’re hearing the story from Rose herself, and I doubt her impression of these characters stretched beyond “what a bunch of cunts”.

And even though the premise of the movie’s core romance is conventional (poor boy, rich girl, etc. etc.), Cameron avoids cliches when developing the actual romance itself. Jack and Rose’s chemistry always rings true, because it makes perfect sense. She’s a rebellious aristocrat, feeling trapped in a predictable life — as she herself puts it, “I saw my whole life as if I had already lived it.” And he is a smart and adventurous man, the one person in her life who seems to truly care about her — something established right when they first meet, when Rose is about to commit suicide, and he threatens that if she jumps from the ship, he will “have to” jump in after her.

Always a brilliant storyteller, Cameron avoids melodrama by constantly balancing the dramatic and romantic scenes with humorous moments that hit the mark, even (and especially) during the sinking of the “Titanic”. One of the best of these moments is when Rose needs to break Jack’s handcuffs with an axe, and he asks her to rehearse it on an object first, with disastrous results.

Equally important was holding composer James Horner back — and keep in mind this is an unfair statement, since for all I know Horner held himself back of his own accord. But really, all you need to do is watch “Glory”, directed by Edward Zwick, to see how ridiculously melodramatic the otherwise talented Horner can be. In “Titanic”, however, the music is used to perfection. Whenever a scene needs the famous score, it’s there, never overdone. Whenever the scene needs to work solely on dialogue and sound effects, the music disappears — which is particularly important on scenes with romantic dialogue, where music would have been excessively emotional.

After one hour and a half establishing Jack and Rose’s relationship and other interesting characters like (the real-life) Unsinkable Molly Brown, the sinking of the Titanic begins. This sequence, well over one hour long, has always fascinated me for its magnificence. From the impeccable editing to the amazing special effects, it’s impressive and emotionally wrenching thanks mainly to Jack and Rose, who work as a way of immersing the viewer into the film to the point where you truly feel every death onscreen, and you honestly care about the crew’s survival as well as Jack and Rose’s.

Which is why, proving his competence for the umpteenth time, Cameron never spares the viewer, filming every death in appaling and relentless detail, never turning his camera away even when portraying the death of children (something particularly disturbing when one of the frozen bodies the rescue boat finds is of a woman with a dead baby on her arms).

(Cameron does slip in his portrayal of the real-life William Murdoch, though — on the film, he commits suicide after killing two desperate passengers with a pistol. This is entirely ficticious (although it can’t be proved it didn’t happen — or that it did) and the Murdoch family wasn’t happy about it.)

As the director, James Cameron not only does an amazing technical job (building an almost full-size replica of the Titanic definitely paid off onscreen), he invests heavily in the story he’s telling, especially in some beautifully nostalgic shots when a camera travels through the sunken wreck of the Titanic and dissolves, without interrupting the camera movement, back to 1912, showing the same location brightly lit and full of passengers. Cameron saves the best of these shots to the very last scene, which, without a single word being said, portrays Rose’s life after the Titanic in a continuous, fluid and perfect camera movement. Cameron is aided by the convincing recreation of the time period and by the amazing cinematography, which is especially impressive when the Titanic’s lights switch off as it sinks, and the lighting manages to convey the darkness without becoming unclear or losing its aesthetic beauty.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have exceptional chemistry, also being utterly convincing in their respective roles — there is a moment when Winslet’s character sees a rich little girl, sitting near her, being taught etiquette by her mother. Winslet manages to make it clear that she’s seeing herself in that little girl only with a terrified, but subtle look in her eyes. And Leonardo DiCaprio, in an early display of his now proven talent, refuses to rely on his then-boyish looks, using his charisma and impeccable comic timing to turn Jack into an excellent character. I particularly like the look on his face when Rose takes her clothes off in front of him, and the way he shakes, nervously, after sex — a brilliant and subtle touch. The rest of the cast, from the captivating Kathy Bates (as Unsinkable Molly), to the heartfelt Gloria Stuart (as the older Rose) and the arrogant Billy Zane (as Caledon Hockley) are, as a whole, convincing and competent.

In fact, Jack seems to be based on none other than his creator, James Cameron himself — it’s no wonder that all the drawings in Jack’s book were actually drawn by Cameron, an exceptionally talented artist, and that on the scene Jack draws Rose, it’s Cameron’s hands drawing her, not DiCaprio’s — not to mention Jack has the same adventurous spirit Cameron had when younger, and still has to this day (just try telling Cameron he can’t do something — everyone said “Titanic” would be a disaster, prior to its release).

So honestly? “Titanic” is a classic. I’m happy to see that, as I near my twenty-somethings, this movie hasn’t lost its heart, at least for me. In fact, after more than a year reviewing movies (which made me more observant and nitpicky), it’s even more satisfying that I didn’t really find anything significant to dislike in “Titanic” — it simply works. It more than succeeds in its emotional and dramatic goals.

Let me put it this way: in most disaster movies I see, I care more about the main characters (or, when watching a Roland Emmerich movie, no-one at all) than everyone else. I rarely think of the thousands who died in the background, only about the main group that mostly makes it to safety.

And the reason I truly love “Titanic” is that it makes me feel the weight of the catastrophe as a whole, providing a rich and satisfying cinematic experience.

So yeah, since his career truly started (with “The Terminator”, since his actual first film was “Piranhas 2″), James Cameron, always a dedicated innovator and brilliant storyteller, hasn’t yet disappointed me.

Written by André Navarro on November 30, 2009 

http://andrenavarro.wordpress.com/

Last updated: 2009-12-22 13:39:26 by andre_navarro