Titanic
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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To speak about the artistry of Titanic rather than its economics is to assume that the audience’s pleasure counts for more than the investors’ bank accounts–hardly the assumption that rules the current discourse about the movie. The five-page spread in the December 8 issue of Time magazine includes over three pages devoted to hand-wringing in the lead article, which is headlined “Was all the misery worth it?” That’s followed by Richard Corliss’s negative review, which occupies only two-thirds of one page and concludes, “Ultimately, Titanic will sail or sink not on its budget but on its merits as drama and spectacle. The regretful verdict here: Dead in the water.” Then Cameron is allotted a final page to defend himself, though the obsession with the bottom line in the preceding onslaught forces him to devote nearly all of his rebuttal to production and business details rather than aesthetics. The package could easily have appeared in Forbes, Fortune, or Variety. Yet whose money and whose interests are actually inspiring all this nervousness? Considering the amount of abuse that this movie dishes out to the privileged first-class passengers, isn’t it possible that this is what really has Time so hot and bothered?
Morally and conceptually, this movie could almost have been made in 1912, the year the Titanic sank and the year that D.W. Griffith made Man’s Genesis, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and The New York Hat. I hasten to add that this was still three years before The Birth of a Nation, the picture that established features as the central attraction of moviegoing, and that there’s nothing about Kate Winslet that suggests either Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. (If her pulchritude and sass recall any silent actress of the teens, it might be Theda Bara.) Moreover, when Cameron resorts to Griffith-like crosscutting to build momentum, he’s hamstrung by his wide-screen format, which is less amenable to fast cutting than the screen ratio Griffith had to work with, and by the wealth of visual details (such as crowds and fixtures) he has to coordinate; even Cameron’s 1989 The Abyss, which worked with a simpler game plan, has better suspense sequences than this movie.
But once the original owner of the diamond, the 101-year-old Rose (Gloria Stuart, a Hollywood veteran best known for her work with John Ford, Busby Berkeley, and James Whale), enters the picture and proceeds to narrate the 1912 story in flashbacks, much of the eeriness in confronting the past is lost. For one thing, Cameron insists on having everyone speak 90s dialogue; he clearly doesn’t know how to make his characters speak 1912 dialogue without alienating the audience. And he makes the ludicrous decision to give the 1912 Rose a recently acquired collection of paintings ranging from Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon and one of Monet’s water lily canvases to familiar pieces by Degas and Cezanne, all of which presumably sank to the bottom of the ocean. Cameron can’t resist referencing works we know to show us how prescient Rose was, making her in effect the soul sister of Gertrude Stein. (She’s also hip to Freud, we learn in a scene that seems equally forced and improbable–though it also makes her seem progressive.) Still, a sense of awe about the mysteriousness of the past lingers, and the film’s poignancy would be severely curtailed without it.
Given the religious overtones of this last phrase–reinforced when Rose adds a little later, speaking of Jack Dawson, “He saved me, in every way that a person can be saved”–it stands to reason that everything leading up to this grim conclusion would impart the same basic lesson. According to the press book, 32 percent of the Titanic’s passengers and crew survived, and out of this number 60 percent (199 people) were first-class passengers and 25 percent (125 people) were third class. (The press book also tailors its facts, excluding the second-class passengers, and where the crew fits into this arithmetic is anyone’s guess.)
