Post by Captain Snark on Apr 10, 2015 0:04:06 GMT -5
Hoo boy. I'm concerned to avoid overusing words like "shameless," but there are few adjectives more suitable to James Cameron's 1997 three-hour megabudget blockbuster Titanic. "Cheesy" is close, I'll admit.
The story is about upper-class girl Kate Winslet travelling first class on the same doomed ocean liner as blue collar artist-adventurer Leo di Caprio. Which is to say, it's Hollywood's standard "rich girl meets back-of-the-tracks boy" story, but to be frank, Disney did it better with doggies in Lady and the Tramp. Kate's being pressured into marrying millionaire goon Billy Zane, making her a bit suicidal. One thing that annoys me about recent romantic movies like this is that they make the hero's romantic rival completely loathsome, presumably because today's moviegoers are too inattentive to allow any doubt about which guy the girl should prefer. (Another example is Colin Firth in the overpraised Shakespeare in Love.) Give me a classic romantic comedy like The Awful Truth or His Girl Friday, in both of which Ralph Bellamy is a perfectly nice guy who doesn't stand a chance against Cary Grant!
Garry Marshall isn't the only director who knows his cliches. Cameron knows them all, from the "Picasso won't amount to anything!" line to the working class having better parties than the upper class. Particularly unimaginative--and harmful--is his establishing that Kate is a "free spirit" by showing her smoking despite the disapproval of Zane and her mother. (Is her brand Virginia Slims?) But I must give credit where credit is due: in a movie set on a 1912 ship, he managed to work in the "making love in a car" cliche! He also employs shrewd anachronisms like a 1912 upper-class girl giving a one-finger salute.
There's also a scene where Leo paints Kate in the nude. (Sorry, my pretty boys, it isn't Leo who gets naked but Kate.) That was a cliche-of-the moment: there were similar scenes with Helen Hunt in As Good as it Gets and Gwyneth Paltrow in that bizarre updating of Dickens' Great Expectations, both released around the same time. And the plot has some business about a gem that present-day Bill Paxton is searching for, which Zane's hatchet man plants on Leo and... who cares?
Often, the movie's so obvious that it's unintentionally funny. I think in particular of an enraged Zane chasing Kate and Leo through the sinking ship and firing a gun at them. It brings to mind all those cartoons where Yosemite Sam chased Bugs Bunny while firing his rifle, but in those classic shorts the dialogue was better written. I felt sorry for Kate having all those stilted aristocratic lines to deliver, and I'm not surprised that it's her most mannered performance.
There have been other movies about the Titanic disaster. There was a '50s Hollywood production featuring a young Robert Wagner, whose acting is anything but Wagnerian. There was also a movie of the Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, about the real-life Titanic heroine. That version had two major flaws. One was casting Debbie Reynolds in the title role: she was simply too petite to credibly fit the role. Kathy Bates in this version is a better match. And the other was having her get back together with her husband afterward, which never happened in real life: a cynical audience-pleasing lie, very '50s! A year or two after this version, they released on video Titanic: The Animated Movie, with a label that said "Child-friendly ending: everyone gets rescued and lives happily ever after!" (Can't wait for Auschwitz: The Animated Movie!) And there was a '50s British movie titled A Night to Remember, which compared to Titanic did more with less.
Essentially, Titanic is a movie about two young people from 1997 being put into a time capsule and sent back to 1992 to entertain 1997 teenagers. If you're over 21 (or maybe even if you aren't!), it's better to spend those three hours filling out your tax form or doing yard work or learning CPR or volunteering at a homeless shelter or canvassing for a left-wing candidate or going to the dentist or bathing your pet or studying a foreign language or enrolling in film school so you can know enough to make better movies than this one...