Titanic

Amidst Titanic's gargantuan excesses, there's at least a scary heroine.

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and directed by James Cameron

A Paramount Pictures Release

The megamillion-dollar dinghy disaster.

Everything about James Cameron's new movie is huge. A long time coming (it was supposed to be a summer release) and a long time running (over three hours), Titanic arrives in theaters accompanied by plenty of buzz, most of it about size. The trailer has been in theaters for months, building anticipation and giving up the plot, such as it is: it features big water, big music, big camera swoops, the big ship in big trouble. Writer-producer-director-editor Cameron's been talking up a storm, underlining the years he's put in (for research as well as production and post-production) and the money he's put up (by his estimate, he's made the movie without being paid). The Song, belted by Celine Dion, has been all over the airwaves and MTV. Star Leonardo DiCaprio has been touted on the cover of Vanity Fair as "quite simply the world's biggest heartthrob." And of course, there's what seems like perpetual rumor-milling about the film's notoriously inflated price tag, that is, anywhere from $200 to $300 million, the costliest movie ever. (So far. Until Cameron gets another obsession going.)

Titanic's largeness and super-mainstreamness are harbingers of what's to come, that is, movies as shameless, grand designer deals, with so little room for error that even the stories about possible failure (by Hollywood accounting, it has to make at least $400 million to break even) serve as promotion (no publicity is bad publicity). It's a beautiful thing, a consummately calculated entertainment event with most every thinkable base covered. This disaster-action-adventure-romance flick combines epic aspiration with cartoonish simplicity, with no qualms about going for the popular jugular, jerking tears and cheers with equal obviousness. See The Girl attempt suicide, see The Boy save her. He grabs her hand just as she slips off the deck: the camera careens, the soundtrack booms, the actors' eyes go wide and their perfect pale faces are perfectly lit by icy-blue, sea-at-night-effect bulbs.

Such hyperbolic moments are what Titanic is all about: excess, style, desire and crazy overkill. Its basic ingredients are lined up like shooting gallery ducks. There's the sea and the unsinkable ship that went down April 15, 1912. There's the class divisions (first-class folks got off, more than 1,500 others, mostly third-class, did not). And there's the "star-cross'd lovers" (that's what Cameron calls them): Rose (Kate Winslet), a Philadelphia society girl en route from England to New York with her mom (Frances Fisher), and Jack (DiCaprio), a dashing young Gary Cooper type who wins his ticket in a poker game and then makes it his mission to save Rose from her suicidal tendencies and her unbearably snooty fiancé Cal (Billy Zane, stuck doing Snidely Whiplash without the mustache).

Indeed, the movie seems to have everything, including movie critics doing cartwheels (even if they find fault with the sentimental stuff, they're appreciating the iceberg-ship showdown and something that's passing for "heart" and "genuine tragedy"). It even has what could pass as thematic depth, or, at least, a couple of themes. These would be the thrill and threat posed by technology (in 1912, this ship was the highest of high tech), exacerbated by human delusions of grandeur and power. Here, the ship's designer, Thomas Andrews (played with low-key elegance by Victor Garber), comes to terms with the disaster he has wrought, in a brief scene with Rose, with whom he has become vaguely friendly. Andrews recognizes that the ship will inevitably sink following its run-in with the iceberg: the ship's lower parts take over an hour to fill with water. Meanwhile, the wealthy passengers continue to drink, chat and check out each other's evening wear, oblivious to the panic building among crew members and underclass passengers (most of whom end up trapped, literally locked in the lower decks because there aren't enough lifeboats to accommodate them). Resigned to his fate, Andrews advises Rose (who's alarmed by the fact that she's just witnessed the crash while strolling the decks with Jack) to abandon ship. He then turns away from her, focusing his attention on a mantelpiece clock, which he adjusts to match his own expensive watch.

This small moment might be the film's finest: it's succinct and relatively understated. Andrews' ludicrous gesture attempts to fix time, to measure it, in a sense, to make it into history. Where most everything else in the movie is bizarre and outsized, this brief, absurd instant might be the point. Pretense and proper decorum are all he has. In this context, the film is about fantasies of control, as these shape public life certainly, but also as they dictate intimacy, domesticity, commitment. Titanic, in other words, is about marriage, as social contract and guiding moral principle.

The four-times-married Cameron has forged a career translating the nuances of relationships into action pictures, brawny, explosive, full of passion and insanity. Rose and Jack are another version of the relationship that he's been imagining for years, the lovers whose passion is transcendent and apocalyptic. See, for instance, Linda Hamilton/ Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn/ Kyle in The Terminator, whose love transcends time: "I came back for you, Sarah." Or the infamous kiss between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, against a nuclear mushroom-cloud backdrop.

What makes these repeated scenarios more interesting than tedious is not so much the enormity and outrageousness of the contexts (undersea aliens, international spy rings, apocalypses impending and already-done), but the ass-kicking girls who propel them (and for what it's worth, Cameron's inspiring wives include producer Gale Anne Hurd, director Kathryn Bigelow and actor Hamilton). It's like these girls somehow elude their contexts, changing the course of history to accommodate their own overwhelming needs and desires. These are scary girls.

In Titanic, the scary-girl-as-hero is Rose. At first, she's a bit wussy: forced into her engagement in order to sustain her family's class status, she's looking for a way out. Her options are few: suicide or Jack. Granted, Jack's charming, but he acts and looks like he's about 12 years old (he's also sensitive, an artist). Still, he moves her to greatness, forcing her to promise that she'll survive (against Cal, icebergs, what-have-you).

Their metaphorically weighty sex scene takes place in a car that's being shipped to the New World, a car representing a future that they won't share, a car going nowhere. The scene is overwrought, choked with too much music and symbolism. But it inspires her: afterwards, she's no longer tentative. When the ship goes down, she leaves her mother in a lifeboat and goes below to rescue Jack, who's been wrongly accused of stealing and handcuffed to a pipe, left to drown. She manages incredible stunts in order to bust him out, swimming, swinging axes, smashing through closed doorways.

As the elderly, pensive Rose (Gloria Stuart plays her at age 101, telling her story to 1997 treasure hunter Bill Paxton) remembers all of this, she closes her eyes, transported back to a time when she was young, strong and, importantly, angry. Amid the film's general crassness, hugeness and predictability, Rose is a most pleasant diversion. As the film's answer to its many easy-target male cads, assholes and braggarts, she's a singular phenomenon, full of attitude, an action babe in period dress.