James Cameron's opus is sadly hit and miss

Rating: 5/10 (8 July 2007)

James Cameron's Titanic was nothing short of a phenomenon. Like so many others, I went to the pictures more than once to catch the must-see film of 1997. When I first saw Titanic, I was swept away by the whole film. I thought it was a thrilling piece of entertainment. Funny, resonant and exciting in equal measure.
But again, like so many others I also feel Titanic has lost a bit of its sparkle over the years. Its times like this you ask yourself why a film you once held in such high regard now ranks so low? Lets see if I can answer that question.
There's no denying that on the one hand its an impressive piece of filmmaking. Cameron's direction is slick and economical, something that's served him well since his extraordinary debut with The Terminator. The 3 hour running time zips by without one barely noticing. But somewhere along the way, Cameron fumbles it, and like the Titanic, the film goes down with all hands.
Cameron is a self-professed Titanic enthusiast, and he's clearly put a great deal of thought, care and precision into recreating the Titanic, from the jumbo sized pistons in the engine room right down to the tiny portholes on the bow. And he exactingly crafts its destruction, first explained to us through a step-by-step computer simulation.
The collision with the iceberg. The gradual flooding of the compartments. Loss of power. The ship splits in half. The eventual sinking. And then we finally see it enacted in the last 90 minutes. It would be churlish not to mention how eerily precise Cameron gets the details of the Titanic.
Its a shame the human characters aren't as well developed. Cameron's clout in the industry has allowed him to array a truly extraordinary cast. But save one or two, quite a few characters are little more than cardboard cutouts.
Kate Winslet shines as Rose. She does quite well and invests a great deal of resourcefulness and spunk into the part of a débutante forced into marriage. Cameron draws a lot of strength and vitality from her character.
As for Leonardo DiCaprio, he brings plenty of enthusiasm to Jack Dawson, a penniless artist from steerage. But his romance with Rose never truly convinces. The relationship only works on simplistic terms by pushing all the right emotional buttons. Exactly why it struck such a chord with audiences. Especially the female members. I remember hearing quite a few ladies in the audience reach for their tissues during Jack's rather maudlin death scene.
I couldn't go into detail describing how many people there are to keep track of. Otherwise I'd run out of words. The ones that scored favourably with me are Kathy Bates as the unsinkable Molly Brown, Victor Garber as Mr Andrews the ship builder, and in a small but memorable role Jason Barry as Tommy, an Irishman in steerage who meets a tragic end.
As for everyone else, they're all one-dimensional. Billy Zane is cast as Rose's fiancée Cal, a snobbish, controlling tyrant. There's no depth to his character. David Warner is wasted in a thankless role as Zane's ghoulish valet, and Frances Fisher takes the prize of worst offender for playing Ruth, Rose's heartless mother.
Cameron waits quite a bit before the actual collision. So you'd be forgiven for feeling more than a little restless for the first hour and a half. There are a few moments that stand out. I quite liked the way the film contrasts the differences in 1st and 3rd class, each having dinner in their own way. And you will definitely sit up and pay attention to Jack drawing Rose in the nude wearing nothing but a priceless diamond.
But its really after the crash that the film finally starts getting interesting. This is the part of the story Cameron wanted to tell. He stages the destruction of Titanic with breathtaking regard. Corridors flood with cascades of water. The enormity of the hull pivoting into the air is a terrifying sight. Its in these scenes where the film holds a captive audience. Cameron shoots them with a fanatical immediacy, and watching the destruction of these stylised and impeccably crafted sets is awesome to behold.
Yet even in these scenes Cameron miscues it a little. The sinking of the Titanic has been filmed many times (A Night To Remember had to have influenced Cameron). But this is the first to add comedy into the mix. I didn't mind so much in the first half because the people aboard didn't know the maiden voyage of Titanic was doomed. But in the second half, when Cameron tries to make you laugh, its an approach at odds with the dramatic thrust of the story, e.g. the aristocrats aboard want brandies while the ship is sinking. This is hardly believable behaviour, and even disrespects the memories of those aboard. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Cameron does demonstrate far too much of a willingness to guess what the people aboard were like. Painting them in unfavourable colours, portraying the officers as officious bureaucrats, and even having one of them shooting passengers even when there is no evidence to support that.
The final scenes for Jack and Rose go on too long in my opinion. His final words, which are really hackneyed and mawkish belong more in a soap opera, not a multi-million dollar feature film. The image of a floating necropolis is striking though.
Titanic is certainly an oddity. Its a film that people embraced as a whole the world over, and now they go out they're way to find fault with it. I didn't go looking for faults. They surfaced as time went by because it just doesn't hold up too well to repeated viewings. I still think you should see Titanic, even if in a few years it probably won't do for you what it used to.