Titanic (James Cameron, 1997): USA
Reviewed by Vee Rice. Viewed on DVD.
Watching James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) for the first time, at the tender age of 10, I was overcome with love for Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his determination to save Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) “in every way that a person can be saved.” Unfortunately for Cameron, that charm does not hold up upon viewing the film 13 years after its theatrical release. Now the film seems overcompensating and trite. James Cameron transforms the epic story of an ill-fated ship into the over told story of an ill-fated romance, but, he does it with “style.”
Regrettably, the film is hardly about the disastrous voyage. Instead Cameron encases a romance between two fictional characters of different classes in the historical background of a tragic journey. Not that the theme is uncommon; films such as A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Pearl Harbor (2001) also utilize tragic historical events to ground a fictional love story. Had Titanic not faked interest in the artifact of the ship itself, I may have forgiven this downfall; however, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his exploration of the RMS Titanic surround the context of the story as he scavenges the ship for a rare, expensive diamond known as the Heart of the Ocean. After a failed attempt at recovering the relic, he meets 101 year-old Rose, the last person known to be wearing the jewel. Although Brock does not recover the gem, his team restores a drawing of a beautiful, young, naked woman wearing nothing but the diamond in question, who happens to be Rose, herself. From there, she tells the story of the ship’s doomed maiden voyage, and the love that found her along the way.
The film boasts as audacious of claims as the boat itself did in the 1910s. The sets are lavish and striking, and the costumes are highly romantic. Jack cleans up handsomely in “The Unsinkable” Molly Brown’s son’s dress clothes and his hair slicked back, as he prepares to meet with the ship’s elite for dinner. Rose’s memories introduce us to a typical dinner for upper class: an ornate flat leading to a polished wooden grand staircase; at the bottom, an open flat filled with lavishly dressed people, and then an elegantly dressed Jack practicing his greetings. He greets her with a kiss on the hand (“I saw that in a nickelodeon once and I’ve always wanted to do it.”) and takes her arm in his. Rose’s dinner gown is phenomenal: a red evening dress with a fully beaded net overlay; it is classic extravagance. It is also one more aspect of the film that, while aesthetically pleasing, screams over-kill as much as the number of deaths accrued on the “unsinkable ship.”
Why did he even make Titanic? We all know the end of the story: the RMS Titanic sinks; the History Channel has been telling us that for years. Maybe Cameron just wanted to be “King of the World” and created a film so ludicrously ostentatious he could not be forgotten for it. Check. Who could forget the grandiose sinking of the ship sequence that lasts for half of the film? The panic sweeping through the multitudes of passengers and staff, the forlorn captain and crew, the desperate Cal, the water sloshing down empty halls and stairwells as sparks fly from short-circuiting lights, and Rose and Jack frantically engaged in their survival—together. The sets and special effects are high and the storyline is over familiar, but somehow the monstrous hit was the highest grossing movie of all time until Cameron outdid himself in 2009 with the even more ridiculously pretentious Avatar (shot in 3D, of course). I guess that is why Titanic is now scheduled for re-released in 3D. After the successful transformation of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (2010) from 2D shooting to 3D post-production, Cameron decided the conversion process is good enough for his precious Heart of the Ocean to get her second chance to sail.
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