I don't hate TITANIC. Not now, anyway. The last hour of it is
terrifyingly excellent. It's not a hateful movie. It's just that the
critics have gone overboard praising it, and bestowed something like
artistic respectability on it. Come Oscar time, it'll get a few awards
it doesn't deserve. It'll probably win Best Picture and defeat a movie
that deserves it more, like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL or DONNIE BRASCO or ROMY
AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION. And then I'll hate it. I'll be
unhappy with the Academy voters for the fourth straight year.

TITANIC chronicles the romance between Philadelphia socialite Rose
DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a
roustabout in third-class. Rose feels trapped by her engagement to
millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and Jack shows her that the poor
live much better than their snooty counterparts in first-class.
Unfortunately, the tub they're on has a date with an iceberg.

What is it about romantic tragedy that makes movie critics swoon?
They're sane, intelligent beings who are paid to have a keener B.S.
detector than the rest of us. The same people who went gaga over the
well-made but diffuse THE ENGLISH PATIENT have pulled the same act for
this movie. THE ENGLISH PATIENT, though, was at least consistently
well-acted and -directed throughout. TITANIC, on the other hand, gives
us scene after scene of rickety drama for two hours. Writer/director
James Cameron's previous film, TRUE LIES, was two-thirds great action
and one-third failed romance. The ratio is reversed in TITANIC, and the
good parts aren't enough to justify one's time investment.

The picture may have all the period details right, but its tone is all
wrong for its 1912 setting. James Horner's pallid, New Agey music
immediately dates the movie as a 1990s period piece. More seriously,
Cameron has no sense of how to write these characters and make them
sound convincing. Leonardo DiCaprio is a gifted and terribly likeable
actor, and not once did I believe him as a child of the 1890s (true,
he's young, but Winona Ryder was younger when she did THE AGE OF
INNOCENCE, and was much more idiomatically 19th Century). Chained to a
pipe in a room filling with water, Jack says, "This is bad," with the
same offhand detachment we've seen from hundreds of other movie heroes.
When they aren't speaking in the telegraphic sort of dialogue that marks
out most Hollywood action thrillers, Jack and Rose are advancing all
sorts of enlightened notions that prove they're ahead of their time.
Rose quotes Freud - a neat trick, since he hadn't been translated into
English yet. Jack advances his philosophy of "making every day count."
The two admire Monet and Picasso, but Jack's sketches (which Rose
praises so highly) are hackwork. Rose and Jack may be unconventional
for their time, but you'll find people talking like them in any high
school today.

The dialogue is strictly purple prose, yet the other aspects of the
script are even worse. One can admire Cameron for making poor people
the heroes of his megabudget movie, but when the characters are
stereotyped this baldly, he doesn't do anybody any favors. The villain
never opens his mouth except to say something offensive; it's actually a
relief that Billy Zane is so bad in the role, because you'd hate to see
a good performance wasted in it. Jack teaches Rose to spit. She gives
Cal the finger as she makes her getaway. Though Winslet looks tough
enough wading through icy water, you still can't reconcile Rose's
action heroine's resourcefulness with her hothouse-flower upbringing.
Her attempts to extricate themselves from below decks belong in TRUE
LIES or THE ABYSS. If Cameron had just put this movie on a modern-day
cruise ship, it would have fixed many of his script's problems. Of
course, no studio would have bankrolled his picture (at least not to the
tune of $200 million) and had him end the movie unhappily. But if only
TITANIC had had a dash of SPEED 2, it would have been far less
fraudulent.

In retelling the ship's sinking, TITANIC is a compelling disaster flick,
partly because the ship sinks so slowly. Most movie disasters like
earthquakes, floods, and the destruction of the world by aliens happen
relatively quickly. Killer viruses, on the other hand, are too slow to
make for exciting visuals. The Titanic's eventual progress to the ocean
floor means that the passengers are calm and businesslike at first,
and then panic gradually sets in as the boat tilts further and further
into the water. Amid the rising chaos, there's a nice touch: a tiny
shot of a tiny ship sending out a tiny signal flare, capturing the
futility and hopelessness of the passengers' predicament. As Rose hangs
on to a railing for her life, her eyes meet those of a girl next to
her. It's a marvelous moment of clarity; even before the girl plummets
to her death, you know their brief, wordless acquaintance will never
leave Rose's memory.

There's also an interesting chemistry between the oddly matched DiCaprio
and Winslet. Maybe he isn't convincingly 1910s, but despite his youth
he exudes the cool confidence that only movie stars seem to have. It's
no wonder that Rose is attracted to Jack - he's not of her world, but he
slips into it with such ease that you don't feel that she's slumming.
The two leads give the illusion that their romance isn't old hat. Kathy
Bates, who's always welcome, gives her part as "Unsinkable Molly" Brown
a good dose of spice.

Cameron has the right idea in framing a love story within the ship's
sinking. He's smart enough to know that a special effects movie without
a human interest will turn off an audience (witness the fate of STARSHIP
TROOPERS and many others like it). But his script is so thinly
ontrived, the result is the same. It's right for us to praise TITANIC
for its technical wizardry and the very real filmmaking skills of
its director. But we should recognize that the movie's human elements
are entirely stale, however appealingly packaged.