Kerri Battles the AFI’s Top 100 – #83: Titanic

I’ve been dreading this week since I first began this project. I lived through Titanic mania in 1997 when the film was released and saw it in theaters with the rest of the human population of Earth … except for maybe those tribes in the Amazon who shot arrows at helicopters. Those guys probably weren’t rushing to the theaters and didn’t have to deal with the seemingly ever-present wail of Celine Dion or the constant shouts of, “I’m the king of the world!” Huh. Spears, loincloths, and a lack of civilization as we know it is starting to sound appealing. I guess what I’m trying to say is I really, really  wasn’t looking forward to reliving this piece of 1997. At all. Ever. Unfortunately, self-imposed duty called and I was forced to answer by my own need to not cheat on this project. I hadn’t subjected myself to the nearly three and a half hour torture that is Titanic since the theaters, but I was certain that I remembered everything I was in for. Memories can be misleading.

In case you, dear reader, are a former member of one of those Amazonian tribes, let me first say congratulations on learning how to peruse the internet instead of beating your computer with a stick because it’s probably witchcraft. Now, let me provide you with a brief synopsis of Titanic. Bill Paxton is a petty treasure hunter masquerading as some sort of historian. In his search for an insanely rare diamond necklace known as the Heart of the Ocean, he meets an old woman who claims to be Rose DeWitt Bukater, a passenger who reportedly perished in the sinking. Nearly 101 year old Rose regales Paxton and his crew with the tale of her time on the ship and how she came to possess the Heart of the Ocean. Young Rose (Kate Winslet) was on board the Titanic with her mother and her wealthy but loathsome fiance, Billy Zane, whom she must marry in order to keep her mother living in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. Rose, desperate and seeing no way out of her terrible fate of having to marry Billy Zane, considers jumping overboard. Young steerage passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), talks her down, then saves her when she slips while trying to climb back on deck. As the two predictably fall in love, we are treated to expository dialogue that details the many ways in which the unsinkable Titanic is woefully unprepared for such a possibility. The ship hits the iceberg just as Zane is realizing his precious trophy bride is planning to leave him for steerage scum. About an hour and a half of heart-pounding and heartbreaking action ensues, culminating in poor Jack using his last freezing breaths to make Rose promise she’ll live enough for them both. Also, like 1500 other people die slow, agonizing deaths alongside them. Paxton realizes he’s misunderstood the meaning of the wreckage he’s been looting and Old Rose walks to the back of his boat and drops the priceless diamond necklace overboard and into eternal watery oblivion.

Titanic is nearly three and a half hours long. That’s roughly an hour longer than it took the Titanic itself to sink. In order to give the respect truly due to the gorgeous monstrosity of human hubris and the roughly 1500 souls it took, you need time. And Cameron certainly took his. A quick Google search will tell you just how much research and effort went into making every last physical detail of the ship and its sinking as accurate as possible. He dove to the wreckage numerous times. He had the original manufacturers of the carpet resurrect the retired pattern so he could reproduce it exactly. He rescaled the original proportions of the staircase so that it would look just as impressive against today’s slightly taller person. His efforts certainly paid off. They also drove the budget up to more than the ship itself would have cost in ’97 dollars. The same, unfortunately, can’t be said of Cameron’s depiction of the passengers and crew. It’s pretty well documented that James Cameron took extreme literary license of the facts for dramatic effect and entertainment value. But that’s true of any movie that’s Based On A True Story. I mean, Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are both Based On  A True Story. In fact, they’re both based on the same true story — Ed Gein. So, yeah, it sucks that Cameron painted a man lauded as a hero in his hometown as a bumbling, bribable coward. But he’s certainly not the first one to fudge some details about Titanic in order to sell some movie tickets.

What is truly terrible about Titanic are the characters. They’re all flat, one-note characters with zero depth or layers. I could spend pages and pages detailing how simple and overt their challenges are and how predictably they overcome or succumb to them. Hell, half of that space could be spent on the fact that this movie is a perfect example of why Leonardo DiCaprio will never win an Oscar (He has resting douche face — the dude version of resting bitch face. His face was born to look douchey and punchable, no matter how cool he might actually be. It’s not his fault, but it is his burden). Instead, I’ll just say that, if you take away the sinking ship and tweak some of the details, you could just be watching Lady and the Tramp instead. But that’s okay because the love story isn’t the real reason why we’re here. It’s just the excuse, even if it is flimsy at best.

As the credits rolled, it occurred to me that sometimes you need distance from the hype of a thing — in this case, 17 years of distance — to realize that maybe it’s not as overrated as you originally thought. Three and a half hours of Titanic went by a lot easier and faster than, say, three and a half hours of Ben-Hur. It’s an opulent and engrossing film, perhaps just as grand and beautiful as the ship itself. It also may be just as secretly flawed, with a predictable love story and flat, overt characters completely lacking in any subtlety or nuance. Still, those fictional characters exist for the express purpose of giving the audience a human touchstone within the elegance and the horror. Billy Zane has to be such an outrageous psychopath that he can’t wait the hour or so it would take to let the Atlantic do his dirty work for him. Instead, he has to chase Jack and Rose back into a half-sunk ship with a gun because we have to see every last second of this ship’s demise. At its base, Titanic is a disaster action flick and, from that perspective, it might really be the best of all time. — KSmith