The ship of flaws still sails
Ihave seen the new 3D version of Titanic and, as with the original 1997 version, I found it a magnificent motion picture. The hour or more after the ship hits the iceberg remains spellbinding. The material leading up to that point is a combination of documentary footage from the ocean floor, romantic melodrama and narration by a centenarian named Rose. The production brings to life the opulence of the great iron ship. Its passengers are a cross section of a way of life that would be ended forever by the First World War. In a way, the iceberg represented the 20th century.
James Cameron’s Titanic is not perfect. It has some flaws — elements that could have been handled differently. We can begin with some elements that are superb just as they stand.
To begin with, Cameron avoids the pitfalls of telling a story about which “everybody knows the ending”. Yes, the Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks. That isn’t the story he tells. He uses that as a backdrop for stories about hubris, greed, class conflict, romance and a misplaced faith in technology. The Titanic was doomed the moment it was described as “unsinkable”. Its unsinkability perhaps explains why Capt. Edward John Smith ( Bernard Hill), despite being warned of icebergs, cranked the ship up to its top velocity and left it speeding blindly through the night. Many of those on board thought of themselves as unsinkable, including the millionaires John Jacob Astor and the fictional villain Caledon Hockley ( Billy Zane). Astor called for a brandy and went down with the ship. Hockley would have thrown women and children overboard to preserve himself. Also on board was the Denver millionaire Molly Brown ( Kathy Bates), who survived and is known to history as the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She’s shown as one of the few arguing that her lifeboat turn back to rescue passengers freezing to death in the icy water.
Of greatest interest to us are Rose Dewitt Bukater ( Kate Winslet), who is engaged to the snaky Caledon Hockley, and Jack Dawson ( Leonardo Dicaprio), a steerage passenger who falls in love with her onboard and saves her life. She is the same Rose, known now as “Rose Dawson”, who is the old lady, the sole living survivor, brought on board a salvage vessel near the beginning of the film ( she’s played by Gloria Stuart). This old woman, with such spirit and old, wise eyes, provides Titanic with what seems impossible: a happy ending. It is happy for her, at least, because she finds closure with the recovery of a drawing made by Jack and a final scene involving a famous diamond.
The Roses, young and old, provide a through- line from the day the ship set sail until the present day. She creates the psychological illusion that she’s the heroine throughout, rescuing the film from a chronological timeline and providing an eyewitness for the crew on the salvage and exploration vessel. Cameron uses her as his excuse for an invaluable narrative device. He has the underwater explorers show her a little animated film that will “explain” to her how the ship sank, but actually explains it to us.
The class differences onboard become a matter of life and death. The lifeboats are reserved for first class passengers, and those in steerage are locked below behind sliding gates. Crew members enforce these distinctions, sometimes at gunpoint. In an early scene, it is by sneaking up to the first class deck that Jack saves Rose from jumping off the ship. She has decided she prefers death to a life among affluent snobs like her fiance; this shows she has more principle than imagination. Jack becomes the hero only because he flaunts all class distinctions, a decision that has its roots deep in 19th- century melodrama.
Of the “flaws”, which include the behaviour of characters, it’s the final flaw that needs discussion here: It is, of course, the 3D process. Cameron has justly been praised for being one of the few directors to use 3D usefully, in Avatar. But Titanic was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D. What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance. So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw Titanic? No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.
If you’re alert, you’ll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they’ll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness. I know why the film is in 3D. It’s to justify the extra charge. That’s a shabby way to treat a masterpiece. By arrangement with
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