Don’t get us wrong, we love the film. But as with anything you think about too much, see too many times, the cracks start to show.
Here are 20 problems we have with the movie destined to earn $1 billion.
1. Although the movie purports to be about class conflict, the lower classes, with the exception of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), are ignored–except when they pop up as a chorus line for Jack’s lusty party night with Rose (Kate Winslet), and later on when we see them being imprisoned and drowned almost anonymously. It’s not that these characters aren’t potentially interesting. (Think of the way Elia Kazan developed the lower class immigrant passengers in “America, America.”)
2. While we’re on that subject, many of the roles are caricatures of class (good-hearted, beer-swilling immigrants; heartless, apertif-sipping millionaires) designed to evoke a certain prejudice.
3. Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) had to be evil. But he is so horribly one-dimensional-had he a mustache, he’d be twirling it. If he had been a little kinder to Jack or showed more real affection to Rose, he would have been more believable, more real.
4. Rose Dawson Calvert is supposed to be 101; but she doesn’t look a day over 87 (the age of Gloria Stuart, the actress who plays her). Indeed, how many centenarians do you know who could walk barefoot across a rain-swept deck of a rolling freighter and then climb the rail to throw a priceless necklace overboard?
5. We know it touched many people as a supreme act of love, but it makes us wince when Rose tosses that necklace into the ocean. A better tribute would have been to sell it for millions and finance the Jack Dawson School of Fine Art.
6. Clearly director James Cameron needed to get Rose on the ship so she could tell her romantic tale, but the reason to bring her to the ship simply doesn’t hold water: to tell them where she last saw the diamond. (Why not just ask her on the phone?) What she has to offer the expedition isn’t valuable enough to fly her to the middle of the ocean.
7. Much of the dialogue is forgettable, and some is simply lousy. For instance, as the ship is sinking, Jack says to Rose, “This is really bad!”
8. The movie bypasses much of the real-life drama, including numerous distress signals that were ignored and a wealth of authenticated moments of bravery and sacrifice by other passengers, such as Macy owners Isidor and Ida Straus’ brave decision to stay and drown together. (They’re glimpsed instead only briefly, huddling in bed.) Lose a little of the love story and add a few more compelling historical stories.
9. It’s just too long. At 3 hours and 17 minutes, it takes longer than the actual ship took to sink. One suggestion: Cut out one of the several scenes of Jack and Rose trying to escape though water and gates to get to the deck. (And how about an intermission to allow viewers to make a little water of their own?)
10. Must Rose and Jack have sex? It was erotic enough when Jack sketches her in the cabin. It would have been sweeter and truer to the time if their love had remained unconsummated.
11. In Jack’s portfolio is an apparently traced copy of a famous picture by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai. Taken in the early 1930s, more than 20 years after the Titanic sank, the photo depicts a 70-year-old Parisian prostitute called Bijou seated in a Montmartre cafe. Brassai is not acknowledged as the creator of the image anywhere in the film including the credits. Instead, Cameron’s commercial-art rendering of the picture is used sentimentally to prefigure Rose’s fate: Jack tells her Bijou (which means “gem” in French; get it?) is still waiting for her true love. Ugh!
12. Among the artworks acquired by Rose are famous paintings by Paul Czanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. One of the Picassos is no less than “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” the most radical Western European painting in the first decade of the century. The original-which hangs today, by the way, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York-is larger than Cameron’s version and in a horizontal format, not a vertical. Even so, what’s the point of having Rose own celebrated paintings that anyone with a passing knowledge of art history would know still exist? (No paintings of any import went down with the actual Titanic.)
13. Without being too literal, shouldn’t Jack and Rose die before they even get up on deck, after struggling so long in freezing water? (The average person succumbs in 30 minutes or less, or so we’re told.)
14. Most of the special effects are astounding. But the sweeping, look-at-how-much-we-spent-on-computer-graphics-overhead-shots of the ship look phony.
15. In a film featuring Russell Carpenter’s splendid cinematography, the dance-cam, which shows a grinning Rose and Jack doing a spin from each other’s point of view, is supremely silly and distracting.
16. In this incredible disaster that claimed about 1,500 lives, we’re often made to feel that only one story is important: the outlandishly thwarted romance of Rose and Jack. And that only one death had real resonance and impact: Jack’s. In addition, the photo montage of Rose at the end, showing her as a joyously liberated woman who carried Jack’s undying love throughout a long and adventurous life, tends to suggest that all the tragedy was somehow worth it–because it helped Rose straighten out her priorities.
17. And speaking of dying, with all these people losing their lives, there are surprisingly few death scenes demonstrating the horror of drowning in freezing water.
18. Annoying Kathy Bates as Molly Brown is no Debbie Reynolds.
19. The 101-year-old Rose remembers things when she is telling her story that the teenage Rose didn’t see on the ship (for instance, the highly privileged conversation between owner, captain and other top guns near the ship’s bridge).
20. At the end, we’re asked to believe that Rose lived with the memory of this incredible story–the defining episode of her life and one of the most wildly exciting events that ever happened to anyone–and never told it to a living soul in 85 years before finally spilling the beans to the ocean team. Is that even vaguely believable?
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Comments? Criticism? Write: Arts & Entertainment, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611. Or e-mail to tbannon@tribune.com
