A look back at Titanic 20 years after its release
Twenty years later, writer-director James Cameron’s Titanic is the film that can’t be sunk, Kat Brown writes.
Be honest: Were you one of the people who kept Titanic on top of the box office for weeks? When did you first cry? At Gloria Stuart’s old Rose talking about the people who died, or the captain standing at his wheel while his ship went down? Did you consider buying a replica of Rose’s Heart of the Ocean necklace? And, most pressingly, are you convinced that Jack could have survived if only he’d shared that board with Rose?
Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, celebrates its 20th anniversary Dec. 19. The three-hour-plus film captured the zeitgeist of the late 1990s, turned Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio into heartthrobs and made the world wild about naval tragedy. Titanic told the story of artist Jack (DiCaprio) and Rose (Winslet), a society girl whose widowed mother is marrying her off for money. Jack and Rose fall in love on the doomed ship.
Titanic’s US$2.1 billion-plus worldwide box-office total has since been beaten by Cameron’s Avatar ($2.7 billion-plus). But Titanic, a blend of special-effects spectacle and old-fashioned romance, is without equal. Set against today’s incessant assault of superhero movies, Titanic is the last great blockbuster. With Hollywood obsessed with sequels, it’s hard to imagine any studio spending so much on such an ambitious original story.
It conquered the world, yet Titanic could have been a disaster.
The shoot was rife with problems. The budget reached $200 million — then the most expensive film ever made — leading to predictions Titanic would flop. This wasn’t helped by production delays and Paramount pushing the release back by six months. Cast and crew, often working on just four hours’ sleep, got ill from prolonged periods in the water tanks. Winslet developed pneumonia. And on the final night of shooting in Nova Scotia, clam chowder served to cast and crew was spiked with the drug PCP, sending dozens to hospital.
So it was a shock when Titanic broke box-office records. Theatres physically wore out their copies of the film through overuse, and Titanic won 11 Oscars.
At a time when irony was all the rage, Titanic was something else: never cynical. Every girl at my school was haunted by the image of the elderly couple hugging on their bed as they go down with the sinking ship; the film’s grace is going for simple feeling over schmaltz.
That first half is a film in itself: a charismatic romance in impeccable period surroundings, before launching into the devastation of what happened after the ship hit the iceberg. The quarterhour that bridges the two is agony, even before Rose goes down to the suddenly flooded E deck to rescue Jack and she, and we, realize how dreadful the situation is. First-class passengers serenely drink brandy while third-class are forbidden from climbing the stairs: Cameron has us witness it all — and then kills off Jack, to boot.
Winslet’s performance scored her an Oscar nomination, but Jack’s noble sacrifice didn’t impress the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Both leads were at their new-star best: DiCaprio, eyes like chips off the iceberg; and Winslet, impeccably styled in 1912 fashions. Web pages were built by fans to show how they adored DiCaprio, Winslet — and Celine Dion. James Horner’s score, and his song for Dion, My Heart Will Go On, helped send Titanic stratospheric.
But not everyone appreciated such a soapy romp: It took barely a month for the backlash to begin. In 2012, Entertainment Weekly said Titanic was the first film to fall victim to online “hater culture.”
It was, wrote critic Owen Gleiberman, a “powerful, ambitious movie, by a geek-god filmmaker, that actually dared to be innocent about love. For if there’s one thing that internet culture, with its immersion in hipness, control, technology and a certain masculine mystique that binds all those things together cannot abide, it is romantic innocence.”
Titanic fans’ ardour can seem a bit extreme. An internet theory, showing how Jack and Rose could both have fit on that board in the icy Atlantic, was so hotly contested that Mythbusters debunked it, concluding that it could only have been possible had they used Rose’s life-jacket for buoyancy.
“I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later,” Cameron told Vanity Fair recently. “But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless. … The film is about death and separation; he had to die.”
Titanic, currently on Netflix, deserves to be seen again. From the moment Rose emerges from under her giant hat, to her reunion with Jack, and all those who died, you are under their spell. Joy, romance and hope have a place in our biggest stories, even if — maybe especially if — they involve disaster.