 | Looking back at Titanic |
Visualize this.
I'm sitting in the middle of a sellout crowd at the movies. I've been sitting here for over three hours now, but I'm not fidgeting at all. Despite the vast numbers of people in the room, the only sound coming from the audience is breathing. Then, onscreen, the stern of the R.M.S. Titanic disappears below the ocean, leaving hundreds of people floating on the water like an ant colony that's suddenly been dumped into a stream. Slowly a solitary lifeboat begins to make its way through the bodies, shoving the corpses to the side like a snowshoveler after a blizzard, looking for survivors. Now sobs wail through the theater, but it's not coming from the loudspeakers. It's coming from the audience.
This was the scene at the opening night of Titanic, December 19th. After all the great reviews and hoopla, I was beginning to think that no movie could be that good. Or could it?
Take my word for it: it can, and more. In the opening shots, you see
black-and-white footage of the Titanic casting off, and you feel horrible because you know that two-thirds of the people that are yelling and cheering are going to die a horrible, agonizing death before they ever step out on dry land again. This is a perfect foretaste of the next three and a half hours: a heartwrenching story of love and tragedy that is worthy of Shakespeare. Director James Cameron himself described the stoory as "Romeo and Juliet on a boat". You have no idea how true this is.
Titanic movies are nothing new; the first one came out in 1929, when many movies were still silent. And then there's the classic Titanic starring Barbara Stanwyck as an estranged wife trying to take her kids back to America. Or you can see A Night to Remember, which was a very realistic, almost documentary-style retelling of the Titanic story. But this one is queen of them all.
First of all, this movie was partly shot on the actual Titanic wreck, which makes it seem mysterious and full of secrets. None of the other movies had this, mostly because no one's had the guts to make a movie like this since the fifties. An added plus is that, since this movie was made after the wreck was found, the movie is much more historically accurate. The ship did not go down in one piece, as people once thought; it broke in half just before disappearing under the water. Things like that.
Then, it avoids all those annoying little Titanic cliches that make every one of the other movies seem boring. For example, all the other movies had shots of the Titanic sailing parallel to the camera, far away. This movie doesn't even have one shot like that; it either shows the ship sailing by underneath the camera, or it shows an aerial shot of the ship as a tiny speck in vast sea of blue. It gives the movie an epic feel comparable only to classic movies like Lawrence of
Arabia or Gone with the Wind. And when the ship goes down, there is no wide-angle shot from the point of view of the lifeboats, watching the ship slip silently into the water. No, this time you're on board the vessel, watching as the churning water rushes up like a wall of black, ready to eat you alive.
The special effects, I admit, are so extravagant that you eventually do begin to see the flaws in the picture. In other words, the ship looks a little too perfect to be real; the surface is too smooth, with too few imperfections. If you've seen Apollo 13, you know what I mean. Still, it is Oscar-caliber work; you just have to remember what they're up against.
And I haven't even gotten to the most important part of all: the story. By now, most people know how the basics of the story goes: Rose (Kate Winslet) is engaged to a creep of a fiance (Billy Zane) against her will. They have first-class tickets on the Titanic to sail back home to America. Then a poor Huck Finn-type boy (Leonardo DiCaprio) wins third-class tickets to go home too. They meet, and voila! L'amour. And just like Juliet trying to break off her engagement, she finds herself at odds with her fiance. The story, though a bit unrealistic (what are the chances that they'd fall that deeply in love in four days?) somehow it unfolds in such a delicate way that it seems real. At the same time, it takes all the "tourist attractions" of the Titanic-- the famous Grand Staircase, the dark, sweaty boiler rooms, and the elegant first-class staterooms, among others-- and weaves them into the narrative, creating a seamless story line. Just like how Romeo and Juliet gave us all we could ever want to see in a medieval town, and more.
Of course, the most obvious parallel to Titanic and Romeo and Juliet is its Romeo, star Leonardo DiCaprio. But the character himself is almost a polar opposite of Romeo, as far as personality is concerned; whereas Romeo was insecure and a bit cowardly, Jack Dawson is a daring yet loving, unselfish man. And it's amazing how well DiCaprio pulls it off. The same goes for Kate Winslet; Rose becomes a quiet yet feministic Audrey Hepburn-type girl. Although her character isn't nearly as well-defined as DiCaprio's is, her acting grace makes you really sympathize with Rose and how she has gotten thoroughly sick of money and the Gilded Age. Her fiance, Cal, is a real creep; nowadays he'd be prosecuted as a domestic abuser.
And no Titanic movie can resist Molly Brown. In both the earlier Titanic and A Night to Remember, Brown was portrayed as a sassy, gossiping, to-hell-with-good-manners woman. You have to love her. And the good thing is, she's not a minor whatzizname character, either; she's the one that encourages Jack and Rose to get together, and she's one of the only people aboard the ship that actually
likes Jack, despite the fact that he has no money.
Director Jim Cameron went all-out with this one, with its record-setting budget and its nightmare shooting schedules. But let me tell you: IT WAS ALL WORTH IT.
Do you agree with my review? Disagree?
E-mail me at peter_j_s@hotmail.com.
I appreciate your input!
Guide to Titanic
The Making of Titanic
