Titanic
(1997)
Can there be
a clearer example than James Cameron of a film director diminishing creatively as
their artistic freedom expands? Technically, his work is as accomplished as ever, and
he continues to innovate in the effects field. But his output has become cruder
and cruder. The worst thing that could have happened to his ego was topping the
most successful film ever (needless to say, not accounting for inflation) with
wall-to-wall Oscar glory. Because Titanic
is an infantile, vulgar affair, so clumsy in its attempts at depicting heartfelt
romance and capturing tragic resonance that you’d be forgiven for thinking it
was intended as a parody.
In
retrospect, the writing was on the wall when Cameron went back to the well and
made Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s
an effective, propulsive thriller, but also a bloated, glossy repeat of the
precise, economical original. Prior to this, Cameron made what ought to have been his best film (and is still very good, in
extended form, at least). An expensive, watery love story called The Abyss, it was a commercial
disappointment for Fox. Cameron’s weakness for bombastic dialogue and
heavy-handed emotional beats were filtered by the extraordinary efforts of a
cast led by Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; they make you believe in
the scenario, and the rekindling of affection between an estranged couple. It’s
this, rather than Titanic that should
have been feted. T2 saw Cameron claw
back his commercial clout; it was an understandably cynical exercise, but the
challenge of employing cutting-edge special effects got Cameron’s creative
juices flowing. His follow-up, True Lies,
an ill-advised flirtation with action comedy, exposed the director’s weaknesses
at their most unflattering yet. Known for being a humourless tyrant on set,
perhaps he felt the need to show people he had a funny bone. In which case, he
failed. The comedy is either limp or unsettling, with a plot revolving around
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spy who, suspecting his wife of having an affair,
employs his craft to keep tabs on, and then scare the shit out of, her. And
then he made another expensive, watery love story.
Tellingly, it
wasn’t the chance to flex his romantic muscles that attracted Cameron to Titanic. Rather, it was his fascination
with shipwrecks. Don’t get me wrong, the guy is good with story structure; he
should be, as he ardently follows the template for the hero’s journey. It’s why
his tales invariably connect with audiences. But the manner in which he fleshes
out those bare bones highlights his limitations. His characters usually amount
to little more than crude stereotypes and, unless he’s dealing with hardboiled
military personnel (an endless source of fascination for him), their dialogue is
similarly impoverished. Even then, look at the laughably demonic Colonel
Quaritch. Titanic and Avatar employ a string of clichés in
place of well-rounded characterisations. The director himself accused critics
of Titanic of mistaking archetypes
for clichés, but the former becomes the latter when rendered without flair or
imagination.
I’m not going
to malign the tastes of those who connect with Titanic; I just genuinely don’t derive the pleasure from it they do. And not out of some fashionable backlash. I found the romance clumsy
and the characters shallow when I first saw it in 1998. And the telegraphing of
important plot points is so lazy, you’d think this was a first draft
script. But I do have to credit Cameron
with understanding his audience; you must be doing something right to mount a hit
of this scale. Obviously, “Leo-mania” was a key factor in the film’s success, with
women making up the largest section of the audience. But the same audience
didn’t flock to see The Beach or The Man in the Iron Mask. It was the
specific combination of his boyish good looks and Jack’s noble self-sacrifice
in the name of love that ensured all those repeat visits to the cinema.
Left to his
own devices, Cameron might have been expected to fashion a plot more akin
to The Hindenburg; someone puts a bomb
on the Titanic and the plot involves a race against time to defuse it. It wouldn’t
surprise me if he’d considered something along those lines and warned himself
off, after noting the money that film didn’t make. Lest we forget, Titanic was widely predicted to turn
into a prize turkey. Even its director foresaw significant losses before the
test screening raves began flooding in. History repeated itself with Avatar, so I doubt anyone will be
second-guessing Cameron for a while now.
He took the
plot of Lady and the Tramp, set it
aboard a doomed ship, and added a tragic twist (what if Tramp had snuffed it at
the end?) DiCaprio’s poor, itinerant artist Jack (he was sketching prostitutes
in Paris, don’t you know!) meets up with Kate Winslet’s spoiled posh totty Rose
(but she’s cutting-edge cultured; she buys Picassos and reads Freud – what a
gal!) and love blossoms across the class divide. Alas, quite aside from the
soon-to-be-sinking ship, there are numerous obstacles in the way of their
happiness.
Jack is
Cameron’s idealised version of his younger self, full of life and adventure and
pulling the ladies by virtue of the enormity of his creative chops (Jimbo
himself drew the sketch of Rose in the film). Rose is the director’s perfect
woman (in real life he married Suzy Amis, who plays Rose’s granddaughter);
intelligent and outspoken, an action chick who nevertheless needs rescuing (and
teaching to spit) by a strong man. Cameron likes his strong women, and
particularly likes having them pick up arms (be they guns or axes) in the
course of their duties. Mirthsome closing photos show Rose as a qualified pilot
and an equestrian who eschews sidesaddle. Rose is a proto-feminist, of course,
but what Cameron is really looking for is a man with tits. The love story is the
sort of thing the Zucker brothers and Abrahams would have mercilessly ripped
the piss out of, if they'd had an Airplane!
or Naked Gun in the offing.
The framing
section is an unnecessary device borne of Cameron’s desire to show the actual
wreck (which he actually went out and shot, making a big thing of this being important to Fox). Bill Paxton is uncharacteristically at-sea with his
treasure hunter, while his boorish technical expert, who shows overwhelming
insensitivity towards the centenarian Rose, sets the scene for what will follow
with his witless cartoonishness. This is a writer-director so crass that he calls
Rose’s jewel “Heart of the Ocean”.
Next thing you know he’ll be inventing a rare mineral called, oh I don’t know, “unobtainium”.
Some of the
most cringeworthy moments are those where Jimbo imbues his characters
with remarkable prescience. Not only does Rose recognise the genius of Picasso
but she is so schooled in the theories of Dr. Freud that she can make jokes
about massive boats being penis substitutes. Good gags never get old, eh? Especially when they're ahead of their time. She
is also so observant that she spots the shortage of lifeboats well in advance of needing one.
Cameron is just as blundering in his pointed references to the ship’s
unsinkability and the dangers of going at full speed (at one point, there’s a
vague possibility that Jack and Rose canoodling might distract the lookouts from
spotting the iceberg.; alas, it’s not to be).
DiCaprio and
Winslet are fine, but their characters are paper-thin. As such, they’re quite
atypical roles for such “serious” thesps (DiCaprio took some persuading to take
a part he had no interest in, but Winslet really chased after Rose). You might
charitably think Cameron was paying homage to cheap romance novels, except that
this kind of one-dimensionality is increasingly evident in his screenplays (as
if he is slowly regressing). The clichéd motivations and dialogue are stacked
up, to the point where each new declaration elicits exasperated laughter. He
utterly fails to convey the depths of feeling they have for each other. The great “moments” fall flat, be it Jack’s “I’m king of the world!” or his repeat
run with Rose at the prow of the ship. No level of tackiness is beyond the
director, such that he even resorts to an outstretched hand on misted-up glass
when Jack and Rose have sex. The occasional moment undercuts expectations, such
that the rescue of a small child is prevented when the father arrives. He heads
off in the wrong direction with her and they are engulfed by water. If we
didn’t know Cameron has no funny bone, one might think a sick sense of humour
was coming to the fore.
The cast is replete
with fine actors (and Billy Zane, but he's a cool dude) used abysmally. Billy Zane at least seems to
be enjoying himself as the most hissable cad imaginable; an “unimaginable bastard”, even (you have to
love him for the moment where he seizes a child as tender in obtaining a seat
on a lifeboat). Just as well, since he hasn't had a role of this profile since.
Kathy Bates plays the real life Molly Brown; she married money, and because
she’s not posh, she’s a thoroughly good salt-of-the-earth type. She even lends
Jack a tux. Bates could sleepwalk through this sort of part, so credit to her
for bringing a necessary gusto and trying to make Brown more multi-faceted than
she is. David Warner is Billy Zane’s valet, Frances Fisher is Rose’s mum; one’s
a one-note villain, the other a one-note snob (who is saddled with a hackneyed
speech justifying trying to marry off Rose, because of the terribly unfair
second class status of women in society; Jimbo wants you to know he knows his
history of injustice!) Bernard Hill has one decent moment, even if it’s as
predictable as they come; his captain goes down with his vessel, dazed and
disbelieving.
Cameron
ensures there are no shades of grey to be found on his ship. Anyone poor is
noble. Or rather, anyone poor, working class and American/Irish/Italian (as
James Horner’s cloying score emphasises, the Irish are a lyrical, dreamy,
romantic bunch). Rose is okay because she rejects her privilege for love (so
she’s noble too). But if you’re rich (working class Molly Brown excepted) or
English, you’re a dreadful person. And likely as not the sort who will shoot
down third-class passengers with impunity (a scene reported by some eye-witness
accounts, but nevertheless delivered by Cameron with gleeful relish).
Ironically,
given the references to penis subsititutes, what actually gets Cameron going is
the hardware. He may have Jack attentively drawing Rose, but one only has to
see his loving depiction of the engine room to understand where he’s really
smitten. It’s strange to note that, for all the impressiveness of his
undertaking and the seamlessness of the majority of the special effects,
Cameron’s skies never look less than artificial.
When the
action begins, there is consistently strong staging, in particular the depiction
of the gradually flooding ship, but the director has to overdo everything. Rose
rescues Jack from his imprisonment, only for them to pursued back into the bowels
of the ship by gun-wielding Billy Zane. It’s not just the cynical maneouvring
to show off more destruction, complete with for-the-sake-of-it slow motion (which
feels out of place, but it’s one of Cameron’s action tools); it’s also
tiresomely coarse in design. The relaxed quality of the passengers in the
early stages is a nice touch, but repeatedly cutting back to the musicians
becomes an ironic cue beaten to death. It’s the technical virtuosity alone that prevents me from completely
writing off the film; the characters may be silly and/or irritating, but the
spectacle in the latter half is at times undeniably compelling (the closing stages
of the submerging especially so, as the ship breaks in half, then rises 90
degrees before resuming its descent).
Is there any
need for Titanic to last three hours?
Bloat has been a problem for the Cameron ever since Aliens, but he has usually managed to justify it by manufacturing
relentless thrill rides. Here, he spends an inordinate amount of time trying
the viewer’s patience. Of course, he frontloads the tedium such that, even
though the film moves at a crawl, there’s inevitable momentum once the iceberg
has been struck.
Cameron’s
talk of honouring the dead is ultimately undermined by his manipulative
thrill-seeking. And further so by his Oscar acceptance speech. Without a trace
of irony, he proclaimed himself king of the world, led the attendees in a
minute of silent remembrance and then invited everyone to party all night. What
a chump. Still, it makes an appropriately fatuous send-off to an elaborately fatuous
film.
