In Defense of Titanic

[usually] a reflection of a collective resentment of that thing’s ubiquity in culture and media.” You see it a lot in popular culture – when a band ‘sells out’ or someone becomes famous overnight. You see it in movies too, and none more than Titanic, which has had an undue amount of scorn directed at it since its release 15 years ago. I was there on December 19, 1997, opening night at Westhills Cinemas in Calgary. When the lights came up, the only thing you could hear was sniffing and snorting as women dabbed their eyes and men pretended they weren’t verklempt. But I’m here to say it publicly and out loud and I don’t care what anyone thinks: Titanic is a stunning, emotionally wrenching, technically masterful film that deserves every dollar it made and every award it won, and I got a fistfull of baht ready to see it again in 3D.

The release of Titanic is legend in Hollywood. The film was written, produced and directed by (ahem, Canadian) James Cameron – an arrogant, abusive control freak who happens to have an excess of talent, an inhuman level of drive, and the ability to push the envelope further than anyone ever dreamed of. His films also have the added bonus of raking in money like it’s going out of style.

Many were rooting for Titanic to bomb and for Cameron to get his comeuppance. It was way over budget, way over schedule, and anyone that the studio sent, no matter how senior, to try and rein in Cameron’s overspending usually returned with their tails between their legs. One famous quote of his came from when studio heads told him they wanted to cut the running time down. He said:

You want to cut it? You’ll have to fire me. You want to fire me? You’ll have to kill me!

There were reports of fights and tantrums, actors nearly quitting, extras getting sick and nearly drowning, and someone even laced a dinner with PCP – it was a disaster, and everyone was sure it would bomb. On opening weekend, it did okay. Some critics loved it, some hated it, most said it was pretty good, and everyone thought it would take a miracle to break even.

But then its second weekend gross was actually 23% higher than opening weekend – that hardly ever happens. Then it went down, then up again, then way up. That never happens. Word of mouth kept it at #1 for a record-breaking 15 weeks, and eventually propelled it to a $601 million domestic gross, the highest in history and a record that would stand until Cameron himself beat it with Avatar.

Now I’ll be the first to say that Titanic wasn’t perfect. A lot of the dialogue was pretty lame (“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets…”), Celine Dion’s screeching theme song is like a cheese grater on your brain, and a 3 hour and 14 minute running time should only be reserved for the most epic of epics. But as a purely technical achievement in filmmaking, there had never been anything like it.

The detail that went into making it real became the stuff of legend. For instance, historians complained that the staircase built on-set was bigger than the real stairacase – until they were reminded that the staircase had been built bigger because humans in 1997 were larger than humans in 1912 and they wanted to keep the scale right. Wardrobe, casting choices and set designs were based on old photographs of the actual ship and its passengers. And for the 3D release, Cameron even went back and changed the position of stars in a certain scene when astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted that they would have been in different positions on that night in 1912. I won’t get into the hundreds of other details, but the amount of work and research that went into making it as real as possible is staggering.

Yes, the first few hours are somewhat less than enthralling once you’ve seen the film – there’s lots of running around, a cheesy sex scene, comical accents and the like – but the last hour is a masterful example of pacing and building tension. The special effects are nearly flawless and the emotional impact is still there, even after 15 years and multiple viewings, and Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslett perform fantastically, considering how much was riding on their performance, and how demanding a shoot it was.

So to the haters, I say: call me a pansy, call me overly-sentimental, deride me for loving it, do your worst! Titanic is flawed, but it’s a flawed classic, and there are precious few movies that even come close to matching the skill and ambition that went into making it.

I just wish it didn’t end with that damn Celine Dion song.