If you were a person interested in movies 25 years ago, you might remember hearing that James Cameron's "Titanic" was on target to be a legendary flop. "Can a disaster epic about an epic disaster avoid the very fate it dramatizes?" asked a story in The Washington Post about six months before the movie's December 1997 opening, going on to describe cost overruns, a delayed release date, reports of injuries on the set and an extraordinarily long production period. Originally budgeted for $110 million (an enormous amount at the time), its costs ballooned to nearly twice that, making it easily the most expensive movie ever made. As Cameron's film steamed toward the multiplex icebergs, expectations seemed to sink ever lower.
And then ... well, we know what happened. It didn't matter that "Titanic" had a three-and-a-quarter-hour running time that limited the number of showtimes per day (it was, at the time, officially listed as "2 hours and 74 minutes"), or that it had an ending that everyone knew, or that it was a costume drama when conventional wisdom held that huge box-office success happened only for franchise films and science fiction. Cameron's epic folly became the highest grossing film in history, eventually earning more than $650 million — a total unsurpassed until Cameron's "Avatar" 12 years later. (It's still in the all-time Top 10 for domestic grosses, and might still earn more: A remastered 25th-anniversary 3D version will hit theaters in time for Valentine's Day.) "Titanic" famously stayed in theaters through winter, spring and into summer; many moviegoers watched it multiple times, caught up in the love story of Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the spectacle of the enormous ship disappearing into those inky waters.
Like a lot of us, I saw "Titanic" in a theater 25 years ago; I wasn't a full-time writer then, so I didn't review it or take notes. I just remember sitting in the dark, caught up in a story from the past that I'd never given much thought to. More than 2,000 real-life people — rich people curious about the latest big thing, immigrants seeking a better life in America, stewards just trying to earn a living, children eager to run on the shiny wood of the decks — boarded a sparkling-new ship of dreams on a spring morning in 1912; days later, two-thirds of them died in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic after the ship hit an iceberg, their bodies and belongings sinking slowly to the ocean floor. If "Titanic" the movie had been fiction, it would have seemed absurdly overblown — a melodrama ridiculously larger than life.
And yet Cameron's movie is melodrama, though of a high order; his villain (Billy Zane, as Rose's wealthy and thoroughly nasty fiance) does everything but twirl his mustache, and the dialogue often clunks like an old engine. ("So, this is the ship they say is unsinkable," Rose's mother says, about two seconds after her arrival onscreen.) That's what makes watching "Titanic" a strange experience; you want to settle in to a big, messy, better-than-it-needs-to-be disaster movie with pretty movie stars in it, and yet you're haunted by the real-life story behind it. Rose and Jack weren't real, but quite possibly some young couple fell in love on the Titanic, sneaking into first class and marveling at the woodwork and chandeliers. The veritas gives "Titanic" a nobility it doesn't quite earn, but nonetheless it's part of the movie's power.
I watched "Titanic" again the other day — streaming it on Paramount+ — for the first time in 25 years. A quarter-century has brought a lot of change; back then, I'd have had to go to a video store to find it, and my TV screen would have been vanishingly small. (On the flip side, when you went to movie theaters back then, nobody had cellphones. Progress giveth and progress taketh away.) Rewatching was an unexpectedly poignant experience. Winslet and DiCaprio look so heartbreakingly young and have such electric chemistry. Gloria Stuart, who died in 2010 at the age of 100 and whose Hollywood career began in the early 1930s, performs gentle miracles with her awkwardly written dialogue as a now-elderly Rose. And I'd entirely forgotten that Bill Paxton, who died five years ago far too young, was in this movie; he pops up in the contemporary scenes as an undersea treasure hunter, like a warm-voiced ghost from the past.
It's easy to point to what's wrong with "Titanic," in the same way that it's way too easy to slip into melodrama when you're telling a story that's so much larger than life. I wish Cameron could have resisted having Zane's character, as the ship gets dangerously low in the water and people are screaming and the lifeboats are filling and lives hang in the balance, confirm his status as the most evil person in the world by taking the time to hiss to Rose, "You look a fright." (Enormous props to Rose for NOT pointing out that she is too busy trying not to drown to attend to her appearance.) I wish Jack could have been slightly less superhuman. I wish there'd been room on the raft for both of them (really, Rose, you couldn't scooch over)? I wish the movie didn't take quite so long to get to the iceberg. I wish the iceberg had never come, and the movie was never made, and all those people in 1912 had made it to New York safely, and Cameron figured out something else to spend the '90s obsessed with, but that's neither here nor there. And I wish my screen at home could have been multiplex-size; I wonder if those who first view "Titanic" on a small screen wonder what all the fuss is about.
But watching it again, I remembered how enormous Winslet's face was when she lifted her eyes below her gorgeous hat and viewed the ship for the first time, and how the water seemed so terrifyingly dark and cold and unending and the tragedy so present. And I remember how it felt, simply, like the biggest movie I'd ever seen — flawed, sure, but a wildly ambitious, enormous work that moved me then and moves me now. A lot of doubters ended up eating their words 25 years ago. This "Titanic" was built to live forever.
