Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Titanic is the seventieth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. When RMS Titanic sank to the sea floor after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on a frigid April morning in 1912, the disaster captured the imagination of the world. There was the scale of the disaster, some 1500 people met their demise. Then there was the impossibility of it all, how could a supposedly unsinkable ship with an experienced crew, carrying some of the richest people in the world go down on its maiden voyage? What hubris allowed such tragedy? A number of films have mined Titanic’s legend for high drama, but in Titanic, James Cameron took viewers two miles down to the sea floor for every bit of depth the doomed ship’s story had to offer.
In the mid 1990s, Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) and his team of oceanic treasure hunters explore the wreckage of Titanic by submersible in search of one priceless artifact rumored to have been on the ship. They float by eerily empty decks and brush past shoes, glasses and other personal belongings of sunken passengers. The real prize, a massive diamond necklace known as The Heart of the Ocean, lies in the safe of a first class passenger, or so they think. When the crew surfaces with the safe, the diamond is nowhere to be found, in its place is nothing but a sketch drawing of a young woman with The Heart around her neck. Although this opening sequence is not the core of Titanic, nor is it what most people will remember about the film, it serves a crucial purpose. Cameron — a shipwreck enthusiast himself — is keenly aware that after more than 80 years, the Titanic holds a sort of mythological space in the culture. It’s a treasure chest for people like Lovett or a ghost story for everyday people to unravel. He understands how important it is to contrast that perception against the life and livelihood that existed in the days and hours before the unsinkable ship went down. It turns out that the young woman in the sketch found by Lovett is still alive, a spry 100 year old named Rose Dawson (Gloria Stuart.) Rose is whisked to the research ship off the coast of Newfoundland and begins to tell the story of her time on the Titanic. Then only 16 years old, Rose (Kate Winslet) boards the “Ship of Dreams” with her socialite mother (Frances Fisher) and fiancé Cal Hockley (Billy Zane,) a 30 year old steel magnate. She’s being forced to marry the boorish man to protect her family’s standing but resents both Cal and her mom for it. Meanwhile a scrappy young American artist named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) wins passage on the Titanic in a hand of poker. Despite lodging many floors below Rose and her high society companions, the pair end up meeting and falling for one another. As the possibility of life and love opens up before them, their ship closes in on its untimely sinking. Through the cataclysm of a sinking sea liner, Titanic is able to heighten the emotional urgency for those on board. With time running out the stakes of young love feel all the more intense. The potential of a lifetime suddenly condensed into a few chaotic minutes. Jack and Rose represent the limitless future of all those souls aboard that was snuffed out in the freezing water that night. Cleverly the film uses archetypes of melodrama to humanize all of the real people we never get to see or understand. Their stories are more important than any trinket at the bottom of the sea. That trinket still matters though as it underscores the other undeniable merit of Titanic: Cameron’s film never relents on the absurd and ultimately tragic role of class in the maritime disaster. Of course there is the first class Rose and Jack in steerage, but the tendrils of money and power extend so much further. Rose is essentially promised to Cal for economic reasons, The Heart of The Sea little more than an exchange of goods to him. This becomes especially potent in the final hour as the ship sinks. Not all of the rich passengers made it onto lifeboats but nearly none of the poor ones do. In the scramble to survive, no attention is paid to a necklace, the true value carried by Titanic laid in the lives of those who couldn’t make it back home. Accentuating the deep thematic story at hand is Cameron’s signature attention to detail and pacing. His crew built a replica of Titanic to full scale and the craftwork to recreate stairwells, cutlery and every other prop is truly astonishing. He splits the story up between the modern day expedition, Jack and Rose’s romance and the sinking in a way that ensures no part drags. That opening is especially clever as the crew humorously explains the sinking in detail to older Rose, which plays as a joke in the moment but sets up the finale so viewers know exactly what is happening with the ship at any given moment. Propulsive filmmaking at its very best. As much as Titanic is a technical marvel of filmmaking its also an undeniably emotional one as well. None of Cameron’s technique could save the picture if we can’t buy into Jack and Rose as the heart of it. DiCaprio and Winslet absolutely sell the exuberance of two young people discovering love as well as the wonder of being on this luxury ship, before it turns to terror. Famously, Titanic held the distinction of the highest grossing film ever for over a decade. Since then it has run through the cycle of praise and backlash but undeniably it achieved such success because it struck a nerve. It still strikes that nerve today. So rare now is such an epic scale for an incisive and often intimate story. The RMS Titanic hit the sea floor over a century ago, but Cameron’s Titanic still stands as an unsinkable cinematic classic. 10/10
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