I have not yet written a post on Avatar, but here’s a hint: I didn’t love it. The visuals are spectacular, and I found them exhilarating for the first hour or so. Then I got used to them, and focused more on the plot, and boy was that lame. There was not a twist I did not see coming, and I was just kind of bored after a while, and it went on for far too long. Walking out of it, I thought I mostly enjoyed it, but the further away I get from it, the more indifferent I feel about it.
This led me to begin my viewing of Titanic with rather low expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised. It does sometimes suffer from James Cameron’s Syndrome, particularly in the second half, but for the most part I found it an entertaining experience, and I can understand why it became the highest grossing film of all time. Until Avatar that is.
This film doesn’t pretend you don’t know the fate of the Titanic. You begin the film looking at the wreckage. Within 15 minutes the sinking is described in detail by the obligatory fat computer geek. This provides background for the events we’re about to witness, but at the end many characters are often running around the ship anticipating its next movements.
ROSE: How do you know the ship is about to split?
JACK: I saw the beginning of the movie!
The film balances two plotlines, one in modern day and one back aboard the ship itself. It spends most of its time on the latter, but I found the former interesting for the 45 or so minutes we spend with it. The diving team is led by an unnecessarily blond Bill Paxton, thinking that will disguise the fact it’s the same character he played in Twister. They are poking through the Titanic wreckage looking for a large blue diamond known as the “Heart of the Ocean”. When nothing turns up, an elderly woman known as Rose Dawson-Calvert calls claiming she knows something about it, and that she is the nude woman in a newly found drawing. She is shipped out to the Titanic’s grave, and begins the flashback.
We are then taken back to Southampton, England, when her name is Rose DeWitt Bukater and she is played by Kate Winslet. She is about to board the Titanic and be taken off to America. She is engaged to tycoon-in-waiting Cal Hockley, played by Billy Zane doing his best Buffalo Bill impression from Silence of the Lambs. He is one of the film’s weak points, for he is merely an evil person with no upside, and ends up essentially being a prop for Rose to reject. She is so fed up with her boring, uppity lifestyle that she contemplates jumping off the side of the ship. Here’s where Jack comes in.
Jack Dawson is a poor man from America who just won his ticket back home in a poker game. He is played here by Leonado DiCaprio who provides the best performance in the film. He sees Rose hanging off the side of the ship, and he is able to coax her back to the other side. Thus begins the doomed romance, much to the disapproval of Cal, and Rose’s mother Ruth, played by Frances Fisher, who wears her one facial expression of disapproval well enough.
I’m not going to describe the love story in great detail, for I’m sure we all know what happens. What impressed me here was how well the love story was handled, as opposed to Avatar. I actually cared about these characters, perhaps because we know the ending already. After the success of this film, Cameron may have tried to copy it scene by scene into Avatar, and I just got bored. The romance of Jack and Rose seems to form organically and as realistically as possible, while in Avatar the love story between Jake Sully and Neytiri seems to happen simply because they happen to be the main characters.
Then the night comes when the Titanic strikes the infamous iceberg. This is done incredibly well. The collision doesn’t rattle the boat to its core and cause mass panic, but instead seems to be a minor scrape. None of the passengers are aware the ship is going down, but when it is described as a “certainty” that the ship is going down, the anxiousness of the crew translates to the audience. The ship sinks slowly and deliberately, and the second half of the film seems to occur almost in real time. This often works, yet there came a point during the sinking when the film began to drag. There are only so many times characters can run from water and it still be exciting. James Cameron strikes me as one of those filmmakers that falls in love with everything he shoots, and he edits his films himself, for the most part. That is never a good idea, for you need a tough voice telling you what works and what doesn’t. Only more disciplined directors such as the Coen brothers can get away with that.
The acting here is not the strong point. DiCaprio is decent, but I was surprised at how sub-par Kate Winslet came off, as did most of the supporting cast. The real attraction here is the atmosphere and the effects, and Cameron can do that better than anyone. What he needs in most cases is a writer and an editor, and this film could have been just a little bit better. I went in to this film coming off the Avatar hangover, and I wasn't expecting much. However, this film showed me what James Cameron is capable of when he uses his power for good. He’s made all this money for a reason, after all. Titanic was a film that resonated with audiences in an incredible way, and for most of this film I watched with a quiet appreciation.
Rating:
(out of 4)
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