Titanic

When I was growing up, I was not old enough for my peers to be buying tickets in droves to see this movie but I was old enough to remember the news stories about said droves of ticket buyers. The cliche was an army of (mostly) teenage girls who were going to see it again and again for Leonardo Dicaprio, then a young heartthrob, and the tragic romance in which his poor but scrappy Jack Dawson finds himself. If this prejudiced you against Titanic, that it is some kind of The Notebook on a sinking ship, let me inform you that you are both deeply misguided and missing out on a hell of a movie.

The cleverness of the movie starts at the very beginning. Before I had seen it, I used to joke that I wasn’t interested because I’d had the movie spoiled for me… I knew the ship sank at the end. However, the movie knows that I know. So not only is that not the point but they very explicitly show that it isn’t the point with a framing device of a famous missing jewel and the diving team, both treasure hunters and historical preservationists, who believe it was lost aboard the ship. They tell us that they know that we know the ultimate fate of the ship and thereby narratively tip us off to the fact that that isn’t where we should be putting our attention.

Instead, we are meant to put our attention on the human drama of what is happening. This is a movie about the star-crossed lovers of Jack and Rose. The vast majority of the movie is essentially a period drama where the intimate issues of love, class, and control take center stage. We get plenty of time to see how Jack and Rose can bring out the best in one another and how, as Rose describes it, Jack saved her in every way a person can. This is a beautiful and complicated romance; one that seems doomed but always gives you hope that maybe, just maybe, it could work. It is great storytelling in a vacuum, pulling you into this world of a time long passed and the struggles of the people living in it, but it also does an amazing job making you invested in those people, and that world, going into the third act.

You don’t necessarily forget that the ship is destined for a tragic end, and the movie has plenty of dramatic irony predicated on that knowledge, but it isn’t until the iceberg gets hit that that becomes the focus. In a sense, the iceberg is the perfect narrative tool, as well as being true to history. Jack and Rose’s relationship is so outside normal for the era that it will inevitably be tested, with the sinking ship and the resilience it demands of our protagonists to survive acting as a sort of allegory for that test. On a broader scale, the issues of class, duty, hubris, control, love, and sacrifice that have been burbling beneath the surface are brought to the fore when civility is stripped away by impending death. The contrast in experiences between a 1st class ticket and a 3rd class ticket is never more obvious than when panicked rich patrons are clamoring onto under-capacity lifeboats while armed guards are keeping the poor essentially locked behind bars.

Titanic is also very good at not falling too hard into cliche. Granted, the story makes use of some characters and situations that are almost stock: the rich debutante with the controlling and mean-tempered fiance, the carefree vagabond, the American with lots of money but no class, and so on. However, the movie does an excellent job of enriching these base ingredients to cook up something special. It plays with your expectations, as well as the dramatic irony that Rose lives (as she is part of the framing device) to always keep you on your toes as to where things are going. If you don’t know how the movie ends, the final act of the film is a wild ride. If you do know, it is still an amazingly effective emotional rollercoaster.

On a related note, one thing that really impressed me was the way that the movie puts a human face on what is often seen as a historical curiosity. The way we frequently talk about and think about the Titanic sinking is very clinical. We examine it as an example of man’s hubris: the sinking of the unsinkable ship. We consider its tragic mistakes from the perspective of inquisitive engineers or insurance actuarials with the benefit of hindsight: if only they hadn’t tried to steer away, if only they had capped their flood compartments, etc.. We consider its ironic place in history: that it and its sister ships seemed to be cursed to bad luck. We even sometimes think of the crazy stories of the people who survived: the unsinkable Molly Brown or Violet Jessop, the stewardess who survived both the Titanic and the Britannic disasters. We almost never consider the sinking of the Titanic in terms of 1500 people drowning or, more likely, freezing to death in the cold northern Atlantic waters.

This movie puts that image right in your face. You cannot avoid it. It doesn’t necessarily take away those other ways of thinking about the Titanic, but it does inject a new one into the mix. This wasn’t just a historical curiosity. These were real people, with complex lives and aspirations, facing brutal hardship. The film uses both its time ingratiating you to many of those people, and its ability to move you emotionally with strong visual language, to make the audience keenly aware of how callous it can be to treat the Titanic as just a tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun. At least in that tale, only one person dies for their folly.

That being said, at times the movie can be a bit on the nose with that perspective. While the diving team provides important exposition early in the movie, by the end of the movie they, and especially the dive team leader, act as rather ham-fisted authorial inserts for the director: James Cameron. Cameron became obsessed with deep sea diving after making The Abyss, making several documentaries about the subject while on hiatus from feature films. It is likely that this time diving is what got him interested in old sea wrecks and eventually one of the most famous wrecks: the Titanic. The end of the film seems like a check on his own ghoulish fascination with the ship through the acknowledgement that this really was a devastatingly tragic event. The dive leader, commanding his highly specialized crew not unlike a director commands a film set, has this epiphany as Rose finishes her story; one that is intended to mirror the same breakthrough that the audience is having. Fair enough, but I felt the way this moment plays out on screen lacked any kind of realism or nuance.

This wasn’t the only way that the movie’s ending let me down. The final denouement is exceedingly cheesy and the resolution of the missing jewel storyline from the framing device didn’t work for me in the slightest. What became of the jewel comes across as somewhat arbitrary. Characters don’t totally act in a manner reflecting previously established personality traits or even a general understanding of human nature and logic. It is all set up in a way that suggests a broader metaphorical point, but even on that interpretation it didn’t strike a chord with me.

Despite whatever minor reservations I might have about the waning moments of the end of the framing device, there is still close to 3 hours of engrossing filmmaking to keep you entertained. The pacing is also excellent, meaning you almost never feel the film’s epic runtime. For all manner of film lovers, from those interested in the tragic romance, to those interested in a richly detailed turn of the century period pieces, to those interested in the heart pounding action of the film’s wild climax, I think there is a little something for just about everyone in this movie.

Would Recommend: If the fusion of romance and action, high art and populism, and period piece and disaster movie sounds like an appealing combination.

Would Not Recommend: If you believe great cinema begins and ends with the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky.