There’s something sinful about the fact that you can now buy advance tickets for movies over the phone. It’s not just the sin of profligacy (here in New York, it costs an extra $ 1.50 per ticket). It’s the aristocratic mien you unconsciously assume when you waltz right by the mobs of people who are waiting on line in the cold, saunter up to a machine in the warm and well-lit lobby, dip your credit card in the slot, and — with the service the European nobility expects as a condition of birth — are immediately presented with your tickets.
The whole process interferes with a few of the pleasures of moviegoing: the feeling of spontaneity that comes with a last-minute decision to go a theater, for instance, and the experience of commonality with other audience members after you’ve waited patiently alongside them. But given the long lines and endless wait to get in to see Titanic — the most expensive movie ever made and the most favorably reviewed movie of the Christmas season — playing the advance-ticket aristocrat seemed the best bet. And it proved appropriate for an old-fashioned populist epic pitting bad rich people against saintly poor people.
There are a hundred things wrong with Titanic. The dialogue is wooden and anachronistic, the humor is forced and heavy, and most of the acting is terrible. The movie’s male lead, Leonardo DiCaprio, is supposed to be a dashing romantic hero, but with his high-pitched voice and girlish features, he comes across as a little boy running around a big boat. But these flaws can’t take away from the movie’s magnificence. Titanic cost more than $ 200 million — possibly much more — and every single dollar is on the screen. Writer-director James Cameron has pulled off a feat of moviemaking that, for sheer head-shaking craftsmanship, deserves comparison with the ground- breaking accomplishment of the silent-film director D. W. Griffith.
Griffith invented or perfected most of the cinematic techniques that transformed the cinema from a kind of magic trick into a storytelling medium. With Titanic, Cameron has brought the special-effects era (now twenty years old, as the movies were when Griffith made The Birth of a Nation) to full maturity. He uses special effects not to create new worlds, but to allow us to visit our own world as it once was. He has deployed every conceivable form of cinematic trickery — from newfangled devices like computer-generated images to old-time ones like miniatures. But the trickery is entirely in the service of heightened realism: the recreation of a real- life event that is so vivid and so meticulous that one is transported back to the year 1912 and to the deck of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic.
The movie is masterfully conceived as simultaneously the story of the Titanic’s sinking and the salvation of a vibrant human life from the wreckage. It begins in the present day, as a salvage crew led by Bill Paxton takes a submarine two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic to the great ship’s wreck. We see footage Cameron himself shot that is nothing short of staggering. A safe is recovered, brought to the surface, and, with the whole world watching, opened to reveal . . . nothing but a notebook of drawings. One of the drawings is of a woman, nude save for a jewelled necklace — the very necklace, it turns out, that Paxton and Co. are looking for.
The drawing is of a Titanic survivor whose name never turned up in any account of the wreck — and the last person to see the necklace. Now a hundred and one, she flies out to the site and recounts her story, and as she speaks, the movie goes back in time with her to the luxury liner that unwittingly became (and remains) the most potent symbol of man’s hubris in the modern age.
This fifteen-minute opening sequence is a brilliant stroke, because it allows Cameron to establish the ship as a wreck and explain to us in very plain terms the sequence of events on the night Titanic sank. Two hours later, when the ship’s demise occurs, we know precisely what is happening (which spares Cameron the necessity of going through it during his exciting and tragic depiction of the disaster).
The movie’s plot is an Upstairs Downstairs romance between a poor artist named Jack (DiCaprio) who is traveling in steerage, and a penniless aristocrat named Rose (Kate Winslet) who is the fiancee of one of the richest men aboard. Though it seems hokey, that turns out to be a virtue — Cameron uses the class difference to show off the entire ship from top to bottom without turning his film into a standard-issue disaster movie (you know, the kind in which seventeen people from different walks of life are shown coping with a calamity). Jack and Rose attend boring parties in first class and lively dances with hoi polloi below decks. And Cameron sets it up so that Jack and Rose have to journey the length and breadth of the ship during the sinking.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there has never been anything on screen like the ninety minutes during which the Titanic goes down — exciting, terrifying, saddening, moving. Kate Winslet, who played the reckless younger sister in Sense and Sensibility last year, gives a star- making performance as the plucky and resourceful Rose. It is rare that a movie of this kind should have a woman as its central figure — a woman of sensibility and passion who has resigned herself to a soul-killing life of privilege with her nasty fiance and snobbish mother before she encounters the free-spirited Jack.
Their delirious romance would seem ridiculous were it not for the fact that Cameron betrays no cynicism about it. It takes a goopy romantic to make this kind of goopy romanticism work, and though Cameron is the most advanced filmmaker in the world, at heart he is as much a sentimentalist as Griffith ever was. (This is a man who made a movie called Terminator 2, the heartfelt message of which is that if an android can learn to love a boy, then there is hope for us all.)
Most of all, Cameron is a romantic about the possibilities of the movies.
Like an Ayn Rand protagonist run amok, he keeps making films that cost ungodly amounts of money and present unbelievable physical and technical challenges — and he surmounts them. Some of this is just sheer talent at work: Cameron is a stunning visual stylist, and there are scores of indelible images in Titanic, just as there are in Terminator 2 and The Abyss. But he is also a dogged craftsman in the best sense of the term — someone who masters technique without coming to believe that technique is all. For in the end, Titanic is not a movie about a ship. It is a movie about a woman.
A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is editorial page editor of the New York Post.
