Titanic - Hollywood Movie Review

James Cameron’s Titanic is one of the most successful movies of all time, and I have no problem saying that it’s also one of the most beloved movies ever made. (We’re now in the era when success doesn't always hinge on deep fan love; witness The Phantom Menace, the Transformers films, or Khloe Kardashian.) Where Titanic may well be unique in the history of cinema is that it is also, arguably, the most hated beloved movie ever made. Any number of celebrated films, of course, have provoked backlashes. Just think of the strain of carping snootiness that has always gathered, like a pesky mosquito army, around the work of Steven Spielberg (“He’s too sappy! And manipulative!”), or the routine bashing of famous Oscar crowd-pleasers like Marty or Ordinary People or Shakespeare in Love, or my own persistent impatience with the Lord of the Ringstrilogy, a wandering-through-the-woods saga that I’ve always found to be as ponderous as it is majestic.

What’s special about Titanic is that the backlash happened so quickly, and became so widespread, and grew nearly as mythological as the movie itself. The film was released in December 1997, and a few weeks later, when it started to play around the country to surging, off-the-charts crowds, the voices of dissent had already begun to coalesce. For everyone who adoredTitanic, and even (like me) thought that it was a heart-swelling masterpiece of old-fashioned Hollywood audacity, it seemed as if there was someone else who thought it was overrated and overblown. And you’d better 
believe that they were going to make sure that ship sank! According to the counter-myth, the movie was a cliche love story on steroids, brimming in every scene with terrible and even embarrassing dialogue. No one denied that the ocean-liner-split-in-two, deluge-in-the-corridors, crowds-falling-like-rats special effects were amazing, but in a funny way, Cameron’s indisputable virtuosity as a creator of doomy technological spectacle became the anvil of criticism used to drag down his skills as a storyteller. A lot of what the naysayers thought boiled down to this: Who does James Cameron, the man-machine auteur of the Terminator films and Aliens and The Abyss, think he is trying to pretend that he can write a real script…with dialogue out of some period costume drama…as if he were now trying to be the Merchant-Ivory of historical disaster films?


Then, of course, there was the teeny-bop factor. Titanic was a record-breaking smash because it drew from every demographic there was (do you know anyone who didn’t see it?). But its most feverishly publicized demo were the swarms of girls in their teens and early twenties who went to the movie to swoon, and weep, and gawk at Leo, who instantly became the biggest star on the planet, in the galaxy, in the universe. I had the privilege of meeting Leonardo DiCaprio at a party in New York a couple of months after the movie’s release (he was very smart and very nice — a playful dude free of bad energy), and I can testify that of all the occasions, in the years that I’ve done this job, that I have ever gotten to chat with a celebrity, this was the one time when I almost felt like I was meeting one of the Beatles in 1964. That was how electric the aura was that surrounded Leo.For the critics of Titanic, however, that Leo-as-pinup element rendered the film a kind of Oscar-bait version of Twilight. The movie, in their eyes, was something cheesy and all too marketably romantic, a teen-idol bedroom poster in movie form (its most famous image — Leo embracing Kate, arms outstretched, on the ship’s bow — was that poster), something for the kids to swoon over. And so to take it at all seriously, to say that you actually got drawn into the love story, to say that it achieved the universality that great love stories do, would be the height of un-coolness. It would have seemed, at least to some, like saying that the Backstreet Boys were the equal of Nirvana. The Celine Dion theme song, as haunting a pop epiphany, in its way, as “Moon River” inBreakfast at Tiffany’s, was, of course, deemed so officially un-cool that it was recently dissed by no less than Kate Winslet(who said that it made her want to throw up). And for those who couldn't stomach “My Heart Will Go On,” the final nail in the coffin of Titanic may well have been James Cameron’s “I’m the king of the world!” Oscar speech, a moment so nakedly nerdy that it really did deserve to be mocked. For the crucify-Titanic crowd, though, it was more proof that the movie was a sentimental sham built on a false bottom of ego.