So they are rereleasing Titanic in IMAX 3D in a few months (and, curiously, advertising it with trailers that are not IMAX and not 3D, so… good going, movie marketing people). Now, I can already hear the groans from the peanut gallery, but… it’s been fifteen years. Yes, everybody was sick to death of Titanic fever after six months of it, but then again we were all sick of “Wonderwall” because every radio station played it to death back in 1995 (this is when there were still radio stations that you listened to, kids), and fifteen years later it turns out that “Wonderwall” is actually a really good song and our hatred for it was based almost entirely on saturation, and maybe a little bit because the Gallagher brothers were dickheads.
So, fifteen years later, is Titanic a good movie?
Well, it’s worth saying right off the bat that James Cameron is notoriously shit with villains. He can do inhuman monsters quite well, but when it comes to actual humans, his villains are almost uniformly massive disappointments:1 the Evil Military Guy in Avatar, the Evil Terrorist Guy in True Lies, and of course, Billy Zane, Titanic‘s Evil Rich Guy, who is easily the worst part of the entire movie. He just feels completely superfluous to the plot, mostly because he is completely superfluous to the plot, which is a romance set within a disaster movie. A movie about a boat crashing does not need a villain, and especially does not need a villain to make stupid jokes about Picasso paintings.
And yes, the adorable Irish ragamuffins in steerage class and their quaintly adorable working-class party kind of stick in the throat a bit. Particularly of late, the “it’s better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable” moral is taking a beating, mostly because people have come to recognize that it’s generally a lot easier – or at least simpler – to be rich and also moderately okay than poor and also happy. Of course, given that this is turn-of-the-century times when societal morals for women meant that being rich meant, for all intents and purposes, societal imprisonment and very little personal agency, it’s certainly less unbearable. Also, Kate Winslet would have to be married to Billy Zane’s character, so I take it back: Billy Zane does serve a purpose in this movie, and it is to help us rationalize Kate Winslet’s choices.
But for the most part, this is about whether the Kate and Leo romance works as well as the boat-sinking aspect of the film does. After all, I trust nobody will argue that the boat-sinking part of the movie is anything other than excellent. Even in early 1997 when people were considering murder of Leo fangirls as justifiable homicide, they were willing to admit that the actual boat-sinking part was stunning, and it holds up today. Cameron’s ability to instill drama and excitement into what could easily have been a foregone conclusion2 remains one of his signal achievements as a filmmaker, and the little codicils he throws in (the old couple embracing on the bed, the band playing on, et cetera) could have been cheesy, but aren’t.
And the truth: yes, the Kate/Leo pairing works. It worked then and it works now. Maybe in 1996 people were willing to argue that these two weren’t major acting talents and instead just lucky kids. It was not a good argument even then, what with Winslet’s turns in Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility, as well as DiCaprio’s in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries. But nowadays, Kate Winslet3 has an Academy Award and two Golden Globes and gets nominated for something like, every other year and when she isn’t getting nominated Leonardo DiCaprio is, and when he isn’t he’s busy being Martin Scorcese’s new go-to guy. And they were very nearly as good back then.
Yes, the dialogue is clunky, but good actors can sell clunky dialogue because good actors know that in real life, clunky dialogue is what most people say all the time. Tons of movies have clunky dialogue and yet survive on the strength of the actors delivering it: good actors sell clunky dialogue with Method and commitment, because inelegance and cliche is what we fill our lives with even when we don’t want to admit it and instead want to pretend that we are all Vicious Circle-level wits all of the time instead of people who quote The Simpsons at one another. Most people who complain about clunky dialogue are writers or want to be writers, and they dislike an artificial entity like a script engaging with the messiness of real life – and further, on some level they disapprove of relying on actors to find the reality in the lead and the wheat in the chaff. But it’s still an option. In Titanic, Kate and Leo sell the shit out of the clunky dialogue, turning what could be trite or stiff into what is real, and that is an achievement. The two of them make this movie work, and to give them full credit for the film’s success as a story is only deserved.
So, in conclusion: yes, it was and is a good film. Did it deserve to win Best Picture? No, not even close – after all, 1996 was the year of Boogie Nights, Contact, The Sweet Hereafter and L.A. Confidential, all of which are better and have a distinct lack of a terrible Billy Zane villain. Heck, even The Full Monty is stronger, and that movie was a formula before the formula existed. But most of them are not as ambitious as Titanic was, and it is understandable that ambition counts for something in Hollywood.
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I remember when it first came out on VHS it was on two tapes. I always wanted to inquire about only renting the second one and seeing if I could get it for half price.
You’re right, Evil Military Guy from Avatar was a terrible baddie. Wait, the guy who betrayed humanity was the hero?
Contact?! MGK, you disappoint me.
No, Wonderwall is still a crappy, repetitive song that goes on for way too long. When did this revisionist history start?
The boat sinking in Titanic was awesome, and there were a couple of successful heartstring pulls that worked, but everything about Jack and Rose was eye-rolling awful. Billy Zane doesn’t rationalize Kate’s choices, he’s a straw man for the concept of being rich. I don’t think the performances made up for the lousy dialogue. Winslet does her best, but Leo was still at the stage where when he opened his mouth, the illusion was gone (something that didn’t fully change until The Aviator).
I didn’t think it was a terrible film. It managed to fill three hours, which isn’t easy, but at the same time I walked out more impressed with the technical elements than anything else. And at no point did I really care about any of the characters. They all seemed like stock characters to me.
YES! SOMEONE ELSE WHO THINKS CONTACT IS BETTER MOVIE THAN TITANIC!
Is it flawed? YES. Is it longer than it needs to be? YES. Does it have Matthew Mcconaughey in it? UNFORTUNATELY.
But all that aside, that was one of my favorite movie when i was a kid. Not only is Jodie Foster very good, but it really helps sell the central “tenant,” such as it were, of spiritual agnosticism, which is that while the forms of organized religion may no longer seem relevant in a certain modern mindset, the idea that a universe so vast and mysterious as others is empty is unsatisfying. At least, that’s how I’ve always read the film. Plus, Rob Lowe before he ditched a dignified career for an endless succession of Hallmark specials.
Contact is a fantastic damned movie. I love it so.
@ Cespinarve: “tenet” not “tenant.”
Contact (spoiler: it’s her dad) was every bit as fake-spoiler-mockable as Titanic (spoiler: the boat sinks).
I found Titanic to be very unpalatable. I found Jack’s self-sacrifice to be quite foolish; The Princess Bride has a better take on true love and it’s a friggin’ comedy. And I could do without the theme that all the nice girl needs to be self-actualized is sex with the right man. Ugh.
She likes Picasso! We like Picasso (or pretend that we do and know why)! That means she is like us, and therefore sympathetic!!1
Oh, and a thought on the villain:
In any good drama, the protagonist (Rose) should face the difficult challenge of assembling a synthesis of the competing thesis (Jack) and antithesis (Zane). This motivates her narrative arc and resolves the most important tension in the movie.
Titanic is absolutely terrible in the sense that Cameron is pushing for a 100%/0% split. The only dramatic tension is whether Rose will realize she had been totally and foolishly wrong. She does take this baby step, so … yay?!
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Thus, I don’t think Titanic should even be called a drama (or a romance). Per Cameron’s usual, it is merely an action film. The world’s most girl-friendly, long-ass, drawn-out action film.
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My theory about why people like it is because it has hotties and seems pretty epic. Period. A simple pleasure. No need to dress it up.
(My theory also has the virtue of explaining why very few people complained about the absurd length. More hotties! More epic-ness! Theories like MGK’s “it was a good movie” often seem to have very little to say about Cameron’s length-inducing choices.)
“Titanic” is a very Old Hollywood melodrama, which is not to everyone’s taste, but I like melodrama fine when done well, as it was there.
Re: The “SPOILERS THE BOAT SINKS” jokes: Peter David got to a screening of “Titanic” late, so he stuck around through the first half hour or so of the next screening, then amused himself by storming out and yelling something like, “They just TELL us the boat sinks? I’m not going to spend 2 1/2 more hours watching this if they just TELL us the boat sinks!” It was funny to read, but dang, I’m glad I wasn’t at that screening of the movie.
(That “But I Digress” column will probably be reprinted on his Web site in a few months, as they’re up to July 1996 now.)
For all of Cameron’s missteps in the other parts of the movie, the ship sinking was done amazingly well.
As a human lifeform of the female configuration, I can say I never once felt even remotely attracted to Leo. He looks too much like a high school buddy who was also a sleazeball, so I am pre-programmed to not be swayed by his smoldering seafoam-blue-green eyes.
That said, I unabashedly love Titanic. I choke up at the end. I realize that the villain is cheesy and the romance is maudlin, but where Cameron completely fails at antagonism, he excels at female characters I like. I like Rose. I like Sarah Connor. I like Ellen Ripley. (In Aliens. I know he didn’t invent her, but he did re-invent her.)
And I like that ending, even if it’s full of cheese. In the tiny rose-tinted corner of my otherwise black-and-jade heart, it’s what I hope heaven is like.
There. I said it. I feel better now. Thanks!
I’m not sure I agree that DiCaprio was as good an actor in Titanic as he is now. I personally didn’t care for his Oscar-nominated performance in Gilbert Grape, nor did I think he was particularly good in Titanic, but starting with Catch Me If You Can I started to enjoy and appreciate his performances, and I’ve really admired his collaborations with Scorcese. But I don’t know if that’s because he’s improved as an actor, or if he’s just gotten better at avoiding projects with terrible scripts. God knows Cameron’s screenplay did him no favors.
Your continually un-verified release years make the baby Fan Boy cry.
Hey, MKG, by “Vicious Circle,” do you mean Mike Carey’s Vicious Circle? Because goddamn I love that book.
(And I was of the optimum age when Titanic came out– thirteen. And I hated that shit with a passion. I was way more into books about dinosaurs.)
It says everything about the talent of DiCaprio that he could survive my hatred for this movie to become one of my very favorite actors out there. The story is shit but you can’t fault the effects of the Titanic sinking. That was some find technical filmaking.
1) No, Titanic is a bad movie.
2) The moment that it beat LA Confidential for the Oscar marks the exact moment I quit watching the Oscars.
3) Wonderwall is 15 years old? Fffuuuuuu….
Titanic is not great, but MGK pretty well articulates the pros and cons above. The implicit praise of Contact, on the other hand, cannot stand. That movie is just an enormous insult to anyone who’s ever cared about science and longed to see its practice portrayed honestly on screen. Carl Sagan potentially included, although he was too dead to weigh in.
Something that really strikes me is the degree to which the Titanic backlash resembled the Twilight backlash. Including many of the same sort of people.
Which leads me to wonder if it’s more geeks have issues with teenage girls than anything to do with their themes or quality.
lise – The Vicious Circle that MGK refers to is a group of critics and writers who would gather for meals and make fun of particular targets. The most well known today is probably Dorothy Parker, but it held some great names of its day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Round_Table
A literary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of sorts.
Billy Zane in “Titanic”=kind of pointless.
Billy Zane in “Titanic”, but wearing his outfit from “The Phantom”=indescribably hilarious.
Someday, I’d like to see a movie about the Titanic which plays the main storyline straight, but has brawling groups of competing time travelers in the background of every scene.
UnSub – oh my goodness. That is the best thing I have heard of in quite some time. Thanks!
“I’d like to see a movie about the Titanic which plays the main storyline straight, but has brawling groups of competing time travelers in the background of every scene.”
Oh, that’s marvelous. Sir, I see your pilot episode of The Time Tunnel and Jack Finney’s From Time to Time, and raise you the entire cast of Time Bandits.
Pete – It’s an interesting point. I mean, blockbuster movies are so precisely aimed at teenage boys and men who never stopped being teenage boys that on some level it’s unsurprising there’s backlash from geeks. It’s almost like a challenge to their box office hegemony.
And now I’m going to say something that’ll undercut my point for most people here: is Twilight stupid? Undoubtedly. But every time I see some nerd praise Inception, I think about the dull, dishwater cityscape in that movie that’s supposed to represent two lovers’ greatest fantasy, and then I think about the lush forests in the first Twilight (bad movie, nice visuals – Catherine Hardwicke nailed that, at least). Ask yourself: if you’re a teenager for whom sex is still a promise rather than a disappointment, which makes more sense? It’s not exactly a Shangri-Las classic, but remembering how urgent and horny and emo I was as a teenager, I would’ve probably loved that stupid, stupid series.
I wanted to say Pantless Pete won the thread, until Eli Balin rocked my world.
Fertile ground, MGK >>> bravo.
Just watching the part where the boat sinks is something that I ended up doing due to channel surfing. I do not recommend it as an approach to enjoying the film: the sinking takes forever to happen, and the dialogue is almost exclusively:
—Jack!
—Rose!
—Jack!
—Rose!
…on an endless bloody loop. It made me want everyone to die faster.
Still haven’t seen TITANIC, never will. Will never watch another James Cameron movie. Until very recently my boycott against Dicaprio and Winslett was intact – it’s only been VERY grudgingly that I’ve ever seen movies with them in it. I love THE DEPARTED, for instance, but can’t stand him in it. I’ve only ever seen a couple Winslett movies (aside from HAMLET) and they were both terrible, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
“2) The moment that it beat LA Confidential for the Oscar marks the exact moment I quit watching the Oscars.”
I stopped watching them when I found out how long they were, which is to say the first time I tried watching them. It was the ’87 Oscars and I figured they’d give Sean Connery his award in the first hour or so. Ha ha.
I agree that Burke in Aliens is Cameron’s best human villain. It helps that he’s played by a comedian, even or especially one best known for toothless sitcom acting. And it’s also good for the character that he has to put on a friendly face for his scheme to have a chance of working.
Pfff… Of all movies in the entire world, they pick this one…
@ Eli ” Billy Zane in “Titanic”, but wearing his outfit from “The Phantom”=indescribably hilarious.”
… If they ever do that & add the skull-obsessed evil Businessman from the phantom , then I watch it& pop-cornfor the entire public is on me !
I’ve watched Titantic several times over the years just for the boat-sinking scenes, which are incredible. I cannot tolerate any of the main characters, though.
Billy Zane = 2D ogre
Leo = bland as flat soda
older!Kate = selfish old bat
younger!Kate = twit indirectly responsible for sinking the boat
Bleh.
“Someday, I’d like to see a movie about the Titanic which plays the main storyline straight, but has brawling groups of competing time travelers in the background of every scene.”
After I hit the lotto, you’re the first guy I’m calling.
And while I generally have no use for Titanic, I do admit, I can call up a video of the propeller guy on YouTube and watch it for hours.
It seems to me that when people complain about “clunky dialogue”, what they’re actually complaining about is bad delivery.
It’s like when people watch old Japanese cartoons and complain about “bad animation”. No, the animation is quite good–you’re just not used to the less-detailed character designs and backgrounds, which was all that they could manage back when everything was drawn by hand.
nobody’s mentioned the awful cgi? the dolphins, and especially the walking passengers in the long pans of the ship? once you see them, you can no longer not see them.
“He can do inhuman monsters quite well, but when it comes to actual humans, his villains are almost uniformly massive disappointments”
Yeah, okay, Terminators are technically inhuman, but come on, 90% of the time they look like dudes. Scary, compelling, iconic dudes. Also, Michael Biehn was a good villain in The Abyss, and Paul Reiser was eminently hatable in Aliens. Of course, I thought Stephen Lang was also decent, if lacking a clear motivation. Certainly far superior to Billy Zane.