TITANIC:
DOWN WITH THE SHIP (March 1998)
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BY
PETER KURTH
I
sat glued to the Academy Awards on Monday for the first time in years, waiting
to see if
Frankly,
I wanted to review Titanic without having seen it, because I think it
would have made a more interesting story.
There can never have been a movie -- or a ship -- so over-publicized as
this. The only thing I didn't know about
Titanic before I saw it was that
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet end up having sex in the back seat of a car.
That's
right, a car. Just before Titanic hits the iceberg. That is to say, way into the movie. Way, way
into the movie. Other than that, I already knew everything there was to know
about it. I knew that Leonardo dies in the end and that Kate doesn't. I knew
that Kate goes on to become a potter, horsewoman, mother, aviatrix and free
spirit in the form of Gloria Stuart. I knew that Leonardo teaches Kate how to
lob goobers from the side of the ship. I knew that Kate gives someone the
finger in a particularly thrilling scene, even though she's supposed to be an
upper-class girl from 1912. I knew that Titanic had been filmed so
cleverly you'd never know how scrawny Leonardo is, even though he spends at
least a third of the movie soaked in water.
I
knew, of course, that the ship finally sinks. I'd already seen it a thousand
times on TV, rising on its bow, cracking in half, and flinging a lot of
shrieking people from the poop. I'm here to tell you there's no difference
between seeing this movie and not seeing it, except that seeing it allows you
to quote some of the worst dialogue of "all time," as everyone keeps
saying about this witless potboiler:
"A
woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets" (Gloria Stuart, as Kate grown
up).
"You
could just call me a tumbleweed blowin' in the wind" (Leonardo).
"They're
fascinating. Like in a dream. There's truth without logic. What's his name
again?" (Kate, gazing at a couple of Picassos she's hauled on board).
"Swim,
Rose! I need you to swim!" (Leonardo to Kate, having survived an aquatic
vortex that would have sucked the Statue of Liberty from her pedestal and
lapsing into 90's psychobabble while hundreds die around him).
I
could go on, but what's the point? With regard to history, never mind the laws
of the sea, Titanic is the silliest thing since Demi Moore in The
Scarlet Letter. The only nice thing I can say about it is that Celine
Dion's nasal wailing number doesn't start until the final credits roll, so you
at least have a chance of escaping that disaster.
Celine Dion? Get us off this ship!
Mind
you, I think the Motion Picture Academy was nasty not to nominate Leonardo for
an Oscar along with everyone else in Titanic. I don't blame him for not
showing up. In earlier times, of course, when Hollywood still had style,
Leonardo would probably have been cast as the soda jerk in an Andy Hardy movie,
or as Doris Day's little brother in By the Light of the Silvery Moon.
But he's no worse than anyone else in Titanic, and it's his picture,
after all. Ask any teenager.
There's
no point in complaining that Leonardo, as a struggling artist from
To
the Academy's credit, it nixed Titanic in the acting and screenplay
categories -- the very things that make most movies worth watching -- but if
we're giving Oscars to software, it only makes sense. At one point,
Oscar-winners from previous years, such as survive, were lined up on bleachers
for a grotesque "Family Portrait." Most of them looked like shut-ins
or escapees from the nursing home, and when Cameron, clutching his umpteenth
award, cynically called for "a few seconds of silence" to honor the
victims of Titanic, he was the only one who wouldn't shut up. Everyone
else had sunk to the briny deep.
"No
people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election
on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument
[of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can
depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything
traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they
call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big,
universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna,
Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" -- Dorothy Thompson, 1935