American Beauty (1999; DreamWorks Pictures, Jinks/Cohen Company) is not my favorite film (by far), but it was released in an awfully interesting year. While some people lived it up at the end of the millennium (you know, “party[ing] like it’s 1999″…), 1999 certainly was not a time of complete merriment and celebration.
In January of that year, President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial commenced. After a five-week circus, the President was acquitted of charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. He said he was “‘profoundly sorry’ for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.”
On April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, two teenage boys shot to death 12 of their fellow students and 1 teacher before turning their weapons on themselves in what became known as the Columbine High School Massacre, still one of the deadliest school shootings on record.
And, of course, there was the dreaded Y2K, a.k.a. the Millennium Bug. According to many now-seemingly-paranoid people, Y2K was supposed to usher in the end of the world. The computer glitch would shut down everything from transportation and food shipments to banking institutions and military defense systems. But nothing much happened in the way of computers destroying the world.
Columbine students in the aftermath of the 1999 massacre at their school.
If we can read into the above occurrences a bit, we find a fascinating–but deeply tragic–commonality: each of the incidents involves a facet of life with which we are all familiar, but one that has been twisted and darkened and corrupted. In the President’s case, we see a man–husband and father–tempted by another woman (or, in Clinton’s case, multiple women) and guilty of covering up his lust and infidelity. The wrong choices he made in his personal life affected his work life as well–and incidentally, the lives of all Americans. With regard to Columbine, we have young adults entering their place of learning–something they did every day–and destroying the illusion of safety we all felt in school prior to April 20, 1999. With regard to Y2K, I’m using a computer right now–as are millions and maybe billions of people–and the idea that something as simple as how a machine reads a date could wreck havoc on every system we know is horrifying and causes more than a little unease.
A la Ordinary People, a dinner scene with American Beauty‘s “normal” American family.
True to its times, American Beauty presents scenarios that we all consider relatively normal and reveals to its viewers the darkness that “the norm” can conceal. What appears to be an average American family living harmoniously in a peaceful suburb is in reality a disintegrated marriage between two neglectful parents, both of which would rather indulge their own lusts instead of involving themselves in the life of their lonely, misguided teenage daughter. The film channels 1980’s BP winner Ordinary People in its examination of hidden family issues, but it goes way beyond Ordinary People in its graphic sexuality. That’s where it loses me–even if its premise is relevant both in the year of its release and for us today.
American Beauty took home five Academy Awards for its eight nominations and nearly joined the rare group of films which have won the Big Five, falling short only in the Actress in a Leading Role category when Annette Bening was defeated by Hilary Swank of Boys Don’t Cry. The golden statues American Beauty received on Oscar night were for: Cinematography, Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen), Directing for Sam Mendes, Actor in a Leading Role for Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, and Best Picture. In addition to Bening’s Best Actress category, the film failed to win Film Editing and Music (Original Score).
For more thoughts on American Beauty and its significance, please check out this weekend’s post!
Not surprisingly, Shakespeare in Love is a love story. Well actually, it starts out as a lust story. Will Shakespeare, struggling to distinguish himself in an Elizabethan London full of creative playwrights, suffers from a severe case of writer’s block. A quack apothecary/psychiatrist recommends Shakespeare seek a muse (i.e., a romantic/sexual partner) to remedy his writing problem. When his first choice of female inspiration and romantic attachment proves unfaithful to him, Shakespeare despairs of finding success in both his career and his love life. However, a chance encounter with the young and lovely Viola De Lesseps, who is obsessed with Shakespeare’s poetic writing, changes his mind. Viola, though, is anything but the typical high-class Elizabethan woman. She longs to act on the London stages (which is not permitted for women) and disguises herself as a man in order to win the part of Romeo in Shakespeare’s new play Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. It doesn’t take long for Shakespeare to discover “Thomas Kent” is indeed his new crush Viola, and the pair swiftly embark on an affair. And so the film gives us, its viewers, several promiscuous sex scenes between its two protagonists and expects us to rejoice with them in the fact that they have found one another to enjoy and that their fornicating, such as it is, will also meet their greatest perceived needs: his for poetic inspiration and hers for poetry.
Ironically, while Shakespeare in Love relishes tawdry and unnecessary bedroom scenes, it can’t get away from also presenting its audience with legitimate issues of sexual identity, gender disparity, and social inequality. Shakespeare himself (the real, historical one) frequently dresses his female characters as males and vice versa; and while his heroes and heroines would not typically deign to marry too far outside of their social classes, he constantly portrays barriers to their love (parental feuding, distance, confused identities, etc.), sometimes for the purpose of added conflict and other times simply for comic effect. But Shakespeare in Love‘s romance between a man and a woman disguised as a man (Will and Viola’s first kiss occurs while she is in her Thomas Kent identity) blurs the lines between comedy and what the film wants to imply about sexual identity.
Rather than promoting homosexuality or transvestism, though, Shakespeare in Love opts to support the attraction between Shakespeare and “Thomas Kent” by emphasizing the desperation of women in a world in which they are commodities to be bartered and breeders of heirs. Despite the fact that the most powerful person in England at this time is Queen Elizabeth I, women are still objectified and treated as second-class citizens. Several times the Queen intimates that there are things that only a woman can know or do, implying that women hold value just as men do. Plus, oftentimes men are shown to be not as perceptive as women. The Duke of Wessex in particular is a blatant idiot who is easily duped by Viola and her nurse and frequently ridiculed by Queen Elizabeth. At the close of the play, as Queen Elizabeth heads to her carriage, she pauses before a large puddle, waiting for one of the crowd of courtly men to throw his cape on the ground to keep her dry. When the imbecilic men don’t recognize the problem or their duty to their sovereign, the impatient Queen marches through the puddle with an exasperated “Too late, too late” thrown back at her so-called admirers. This short, funny exchange seems to once more emphasize the stupidity of men who think the world–and women–exist merely to serve them.
Queen Elizabeth, a powerful woman in a man’s world.
In Viola’s case, her father, a wealthy man with an inferior background, trades her off as bride to the Duke of Wessex, a jerk who has a good name, a colony in Virginia, and no money. The barrier to the continuation of Shakespeare and Viola’s love affair, then, becomes “the river,” a symbolic representation of the distance between them socially and the fact that the world in which they live demands Viola do her duty to her family and marry Wessex. Thus, the comedy of Shakespeare in Love seems for much of the film to be, in fact, a tragedy. Although Shakespeare insists that “love knows nothing of rank or river bank,” he and Viola both know that their relationship is impossible, and there appears to be no viable alternative to the imminent parting of Shakespeare and his muse. Their love affair, passionate and sad, inspires Shakespeare to transform his comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter into the beautiful and somber tragedy Romeo and Juliet.
As the couple’s romance comes to mirror the developing play, we the audience are led to feel sympathy for Shakespeare and Viola. However, as the characters themselves realize, their affair, while temporarily filling the voids in their lives, was ill-fated from the start. For one, it originated from impure motives–selfishness, not love motivates both Shakespeare and Viola in the beginning. Shakespeare needs to recapture his motivation and gift for writing or he will end up poorer yet and never be able to buy a share in the Chamberlain’s Men, and Viola wants her life to be full of poetry and not squashed by the constraints that come with being a woman in the sixteenth century. She later confesses to Will that she “loved a writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.” Likewise, Shakespeare also admits the foolishness of their affair–namely, because Viola has discovered he is already married–and (sort of) apologizes for wronging Viola. Both swear they don’t regret their relationship because they have come to truly love each other. But now the film couple and their audience have a bigger dilemma: dealing with the tragedy of broken love that should never have been allowed to sprout in the first place.
Spoiler alert! After the success of Romeo and Juliet‘s debut–with Shakespeare and Viola wowing the crowd as the title characters (this scene is actually pretty stellar)–and upon the Queen’s recognizing Shakespeare’s genius and Viola’s successful foyay into the male-dominated world of playacting, the deflated Lord Wessex humbly asks Her Majesty how all this (his wife’s loving another man, etc.) will end. Elizabeth replies, “As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.” Their genders, stations in life, and time period force Shakespeare and Viola to part, but ironically the tragedy of their love morphs into a comedy (i.e., a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a humorous one). “You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die,” Will tells Viola. Inspired by the love he has experienced, he immediately commences writing his next play Twelfth Night with its heroine named Viola, a story that allows the real Viola to live (at least in Shakespeare’s mind and perhaps in reality) the free and adventurous life for which she longs.
Viola and Shakespeare, tragic Juliet and Romeo both on the stage and in life.
For Me Then…
The best lines of Shakespeare in Love, in my opinion, come in the exchange between the hilarious Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theatre, and the moneylender Hugh Fennyman. When Fennyman panics after the Master of the Revels closes all the theatres, Henslowe reassures him: “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman, aghast, asks what they should do. Henslowe replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” asks Fennyman. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” answers Henslowe. This is exactly what comedy is–apparent catastrophes or unworkable dilemmas resolving into the fulfillment and contentment of a good and satisfactory ending.
To me, the idea of things looking like doom and gloom but somehow working out in the end reminds me a lot of my experience with the Christian life. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Just how God works through everything to accomplish what is good for us is often a “mystery.” If you are like me, you probably think you know what you want out of life: what you should be doing, where you should be going (location-wise, job-wise…), how long it should take to reach certain life goals, etc. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, and He orchestrates our lives to perfection in order to bring glory to His name and to mold us into whom He wants us to be.
But the places between the low points of our lives when all seems dark and the times when we seem to be standing on mountaintops of victory can be awfully murky and rough. They require patience (that I usually don’t have) and faith (that I also don’t possess enough of)–faith that God knows what He’s doing and will “[work] for the good of those who love him” in His own perfect timing and way. How He does so is a mystery, but we who are believers can trust that our lives are comedies, and there will be a happy ending for us despite the difficult times we endure in this world.
I’m needing to take some personal time away from the blog for family. I hope to be back soon and will pick up where I left off with the weekend post for Shakespeare in Love. Thank you for your prayers and support at this time.
For a couple of years following Titanic‘s release, Oscar nominees and winners fell a bit flat. In 1998, James Cameron’s decorated cinematic darling dominated the box office, its earnings more than doubling those of its nearest competition (which ended up being the disaster flick Armageddon, a movie whose catchy-though-often-overplayed theme song by Aerosmith has endured the test of time, while the film has not). But that’s not to say that there weren’t some quality movies made at the end of the 1990s. The funny thing is that this week’s film, Shakespeare in Love (1998; Miramax Films, Universal Pictures, Bedford Falls Company Production) is not one of them. It even feels a bit ludicrous and slightly painful to list this film as a Best Picture winner, especially when one considers the quality of the other films that vied for the Academy’s highest prize for 1998.
Opening scene of the epic (and grotesque) Saving Private Ryan.
At the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony, the five Best Picture nominees only presented stories from two distinct historical time periods (which is so odd and will likely never happen again). Two films were set in the Elizabethan Era: Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, and three films were set during World War II: Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and Life is Beautiful. Each of these five films boasted no less than 7 nominations (7 each for Elizabeth, The Thin Red Line, and Life is Beautiful; 11 for Saving Private Ryan; and 13 for Shakespeare in Love), but the general consensus prior to the awards show was that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a film whose bloody and disturbing opening scene of the Allied invasion of Normandy is one of the most realistic war sequences ever created for cinema, was the best film of the year and the one to beat in the Best Picture race. In fact, Shakespeare in Love‘s upset of Saving Private Ryan has landed the romantic comedy on critics’ lists of worst movies to ever win Best Picture.
Still, Shakespeare in Love was considered an artsy and forward-thinking choice for BP winner in 1998, and many celebrated its achievements (albeit briefly–especially in light of the recent accusations against one of its producers, Harvey Weinstein). The film won 7 Oscars for its 13 nominations: Art Direction, Costume Design, Music (Original Musical or Comedy Score), Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen), Actress in a Supporting Role for Dame Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth (Fun fact: Dench and Cate Blanchett [of Elizabeth] were both nominated for playing Queen Elizabeth in 1998.), Actress in a Leading Role for Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola De Lesseps, and Best Picture. It failed to win Film Editing, Makeup, Cinematography, Sound, Actor in a Supporting Role for Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe, and Directing for John Madden.
Shakespeare and his muse Viola in Shakespeare in Love.
So why in the world do we get so much about World War II and Shakespeare at the end of the 1990s? A couple of weeks ago when we looked at The English Patient, we noted how the 1990s marked the 50-year anniversary of the end of World War II, and how that milestone generated renewed interest in the war–cinematically and otherwise. But there are other reasons for the film industry’s obsession with WWII, a fixation that only intensified after September 11. The Guardian‘s Andrew Pulver observed that people seem to have realized in the late 1990s and into the 2000s that the Greatest Generation who fought the war are aging and rapidly leaving us. Soon, there will be no one left who actually witnessed the events of the world’s greatest war, so there is an added urgency to tell their stories now. Also, the scale of World War II adds to its popularity among filmmakers. Writes Pulver, “The war itself, a gigantic conflict that played itself out in a myriad of theatres across the globe, that traumatised entire societies and triggered seismic political, technological and ethical upheavals, has almost endless potential for storytelling: there are little-known military exploits to recount, reassessments to be made, newly significant relationships to be detailed.” Author/screenwriter/actor Frank Cottrell Boyce chimes in, “The war has become a metaphor, not just history…We’re attracted to it because of its moral certainties.” World War II towers over history as a landmark conflict between forces of good and forces of evil, and both movie-makers and movie-goers cannot get enough of such a primal and relatable clash.
As for Shakespeare, his work has been popular since the sixteenth century, and the decade of the 1990s proved no exception to the Bard’s universal acclaim–in fact, in 1997, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a recreation of Shakespeare’s theater from 1599, opened in London and has remained a major attraction ever since. Not too many people will argue against the claim that Shakespeare was the greatest writer to ever live. No surprise, then, that so many of his works have found their way into film in some form or another. Shakespeare in Love spins a fictional tale about Shakespeare himself: how he has a bad case of writer’s block, how he falls in love with a woman who pretends to be a man in order to act in his new play, and how their love inspires Romeo and Juliet. It’s an interesting idea for a story; and maybe Shakespeare himself, the master of bawdy comedy, humorous disguises, and tragic love affairs, would have been amused by it. Personally, I find it a little bit cheesy and quite a bit raunchy. The colorful 1990s, however, whose obvious influence can be seen in the film’s costumes and set decor, had a brief fling with Shakespeare in Love; and so we will too.
For more thoughts on Shakespeare in Love and its significance, please check out this weekend’s post!
Remember that infamous door? Yup, the one at the end of Titanic (spoiler alert!) that has actually inspired scientific experiments and even a 2012 episode of Discovery’s MythBusters? Well, the controversy rages on (and on!) about whether it was a door or a piece of wood paneling and if Jack and Rose could have fit on top of it together and, thus, have both survived. But all that debate aside, I think the door/paneling has far greater significance for our examination of what Titanic is really trying to tell us, its viewers.
There’s a lot to unpack here. In a theatrical running time of 3 hours and 15 minutes, Titanic presents gobs of characters wading through their various social issues while first strutting around the most luxurious vessel to ever cruise the seas and then attempting to escape that glorious ship after heinous errors made by the crew and the ship’s ownership amid the blatant arrogance of a culture that elevated science to divinity and then stood by horrified when their god failed them. That is a lot to take in.
But despite all the layers of social inequity and cultural misguidedness, what Titanic‘s story really boils down to is something deeply personal; and, as we saw with Roger Ebert’s thoughts in the Weekday Warm-up, this is why Titanic affects its viewers so profoundly. Jack and Rose’s love story–nauseatingly cheesy as it frequently is–isn’t what Titanic most wants its viewers to take to heart. Instead, the film confronts us with life and death–the joy and privilege of possessing the former and the inevitability and challenge of experiencing and accepting the latter. How each us of deals with life and death stems from our individual core belief system. And it goes without saying that we all strive to find meaning and significance in our lives and our deaths. In short, we don’t want “all this” to be for nothing.
Jack and Rose and promises to never give up.
So back to Jack and Rose and that crazy door-thing. It’s one of the most parodied scenes in cinema, to be sure. But in case you’ve chosen to live under a rock, here’s a brief summary (again, spoiler alert for those who dwell under boulders). Jack and Rose survive the sinking of the Titanic only to find themselves thrashing around in the frigid Atlantic with a sea of their co-passengers quickly drowning and freezing all around them. Always coolly logical, Jack locates Rose in the melee, saves her from a panicked man trying to drown her, and tells her he needs her to swim away for him. They distance themselves from the chaos a bit and find a rather large piece of wooden debris, the infamous door/paneling. A gentleman by conviction rather than financial/social standing, Jack helps Rose aboard the door, but the wooden piece flips over when he tries to climb on with her, dumping her again into the ocean. Instead of making another attempt to share the life-saving door, Jack helps Rose up onto it again and then makes an unvoiced choice to remain in the water and hold her hands, their heads close together, while waiting for the certain swift return of the distant lifeboats. When the boats don’t arrive and Rose relinquishes hope for their survival and professes her love for him, Jack reprimands her, demanding that she promise him that she will never give up, whatever may happen. The lifeboats do return at last, but it is too late for most of the passengers in the water. And the tragedy that everyone remembers (and rails against) from Titanic is that gentle, optimistic, kind Jack does not survive. He freezes to death, hands still clasped with Rose’s; and she must very quickly decide whether to let herself succumb to death with him or to honor the pledge she made him to never give up. She chooses the later, but she must literally let Jack go in order to make this decision. She repeats her promise to him as he sinks into the ocean forever. It is an absolutely heart-wrenching scene (regardless of the unlikeliness of the romance or how horrid one feels most of Jack’s and Rose’s lines are…).
Life and death are not more drawn out or visualized in Titanic than in that final scene with Jack and Rose after the sinking. But what their situation with the door/paneling really does is play out in full what the film has already shown us over and over in little snippets: people confronting their own mortality–some being forced to choose between life and death, others having the choice made for them, but all having to come to grips with who they are in this life and what is coming next. Just as Jack and Rose must separate at the end of the film, one to death and one to life–so also do many other couples and families share this harrowing experience as the women and children are loaded onto lifeboats and the men stay behind. We see one father console his children that their parting is “only for a little while.” A third-class mother lulls her children to sleep with a story of another world, a better, magical land of “eternal youth and beauty.” The long-married and elderly Strauses choose to die together rather than be separated.
Rose honors her promise to survive.
Jack and Rose, then, aren’t atypical; they’re the norm for passengers from the Titanic, the unsinkable ship which sped nearly 70 percent of its passengers and crew to their icy, watery deaths. But we get more attached to Jack and Rose, so their picture of self-sacrifice (on Jack’s part) and acceptance of that sacrifice (on Rose’s part) resonate with us in a way that is uncomfortable, disturbing, and also beautiful. Jack knows that he will die if he stays in the water–at their first meeting, when Jack dissuades Rose from ending her life by jumping off the back of the ship, he tells her of a time he fell through the ice into a frigid pond. This past experience was traumatic and extremely painful. Hence, Jack’s choosing and accepting such a death demonstrates his deep feelings for Rose: He loves her more than he loves himself. On the other hand, Rose could easily let herself die when she discovers Jack has passed away. She has already denied her former life of wealthy meaninglessness, and Jack’s passing marks the death of the new future Rose has pictured for herself and him, a life of freedom and happiness. With Jack gone, she seemingly has nothing to live for–and only minutes to suffer without him before the cold claims her life as well. Still, after only moments, she chooses to honor the promise she made to Jack. His sacrifice and his demonstrating to her how to live outside of herself and think of others has changed Rose from the spoiled brat we meet at the beginning. Rose’s decision to fight for life isn’t for herself; it’s for Jack. For her to live means he will also live on. Their little catch phrase “You jump; I jump” could also imply “You live; I live.” Rose’s lost love (of only a few days’ time!) will survive in her memory and heart forever. Death doesn’t have the final word. Life does.
For Me Then…
My grandma is dying.
So, the past few weeks have been a struggle as there are a few other difficult things going on for me as well right now. And while I love this movie, the idea of talking about death and dying isn’t super appealing at the moment. Still, I feel that Titanic‘s thrusting death and life into its viewers’ faces so dramatically can’t really be ignored if we’re talking about what movies mean and how they affect us.
With the above discussion focusing on the door/paneling scene in which Jack, in essence, gives his life so Rose can have a chance to live out hers, we haven’t addressed the film’s final scene, the one in which Old Rose (apparently) dies in her sleep–“warm in [her] bed,” as Jack told her she would be. We see the wreckage of Titanic on the ocean floor morph into the beautiful ship it once was. The doors open, and there are all the passengers who perished–including Jack, who is smiling and waiting to embrace Rose (also smiling). She is young again and wearing an almost-wedding-ish white dress with flowers in her hair. They kiss, and everyone applauds as the film closes with a view of the glass ceiling. It would seem that Rose has died and gone to heaven, where she finds that Jack has been waiting for her the whole time.
The best is yet to come.
It’s a really beautiful (if not confusing) scene and comes quickly on the heels of the camera panning over several pictures of Rose through the years–after Titanic, after Jack. She is smiling in most of the pictures. She is living her life to the fullest. But that is not to say that there is not an element of deep sadness in all the photos as well. It is beneath the surface, but we know it’s there because we were just with her and Jack on the door when she is facing the awful decision of carrying on when her hopes and dreams lie dead before her, when she must be thinking (as we all undoubtedly do sometimes), Where is the hope? What is the reason for continuing if life is full of such pain and disappointment?
The hope that the film offers us, the reason for living that it proffers, is that all life is valuable. One goes on living in order to honor those who have come before, who have made sacrifices for us to be able to live those lives that are often difficult, but which can still be meaningful. One carries on because at the end of one’s life there is something more. Thus, the vague, almost fulfilling ending of Titanic.
Just the other day, a friend told me a story with a similar idea. A woman told her pastor that when she died she wanted to be buried with a fork in her hand. The pastor was very curious why and asked for an explanation. The woman told him that when she was a child and went to her grandmother’s house for dinner, she was always told to keep her fork after the main meal as there was sure to be some tasty dessert: “Even though the dinner was delicious, I knew that the best was yet to come.” The woman wanted everyone who filed past her casket to ask the pastor why she was holding a fork, and he was to tell them it was because the best is yet to come.
As a Christian, I know that death isn’t final. There is life after what we experience in this temporal world. And if we believe and trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, the best is yet to come. Despite the earthly pains of illness, rejection, or loss, the future is secure for those who are in Christ. Death has no power over us, and those who go before us into eternity will be waiting to greet us when our own lives are over.
Due to some family things that arose today, the weekend post for Titanic is going to be pushed back a couple of days. Thank you for your prayers and support!
I suddenly feel overwhelmed for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a bit emotional to arrive at the milestone of Titanic: It’s the 70th Best Picture winner, and it’s the film that launched my personal mission to watch all the BPs. Second, it’s very difficult now to capture and convey just how huge Titanic–the movie, that is–was in its day. It had the biggest budget in cinema history (an estimated cool $2 million), and for a while it was the highest grossing film of all time. It’s still the third most financially successful movie ever made, whether or not one adjusts for inflation. Some calculations put Titanic‘s revenues at over $3 billion.
Monetary calculations aside, yes, it’s a stunner of a film. I can remember exactly where and when I first saw it. Just maybe I’ve attempted to reenact that “I’m the king of the world” bit a few times (don’t even try to claim you haven’t). Sure, Leo’s cute as a button (I don’t think I’ve ever actually thought this…just immersing myself in the general consensus of 1997). And “My Heart Will Go On” is probably the most universally recognizable love ballad of the twentieth century. Case in point, Titanic refused to stay in theaters and merely play the role of successful film. It became a cultural phenomenon. Certainly, it commanded the box office; but it also dominated music, television, literature, conversations, etc.
On the Titanic, Leo is the king of the world.
Nowadays, it’s become quite rare for films that are successful at the box office to also achieve favorable results at the Academy Awards. But Titanic didn’t have that problem. Not surprisingly it swept into the Oscars with 14 nominations (tied with 1950’s All About Eve–and later 2016’s La La Land–for the most nominations ever), and left with 11 wins (tied with 1959’s Ben-Hur–and later 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King–for the most wins ever). So, if we’re looking only at Academy Awards success to judge the greatest film of all time (and we’re probably not), Titanic would win since it is the only film to hold the record for both Oscar nominations and wins. James Cameron’s masterpiece was victorious in the following categories: Art Direction, Film Editing, Costume Design, Sound, Sound Effects Editing, Visual Effects, Cinematography, Music (Original Dramatic Score), Music (Original Song – “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by Celine Dion), Directing for James Cameron, and Best Picture (it failed to win for Makeup and in any acting categories, notably Actress in a Supporting Role for 87-year-old Gloria Stuart and Actress in a Leading Role for Kate Winslet).
Actual wreckage of Titanic.
It takes a bit of pondering to figure out why Titanic (the film) was launched upon the world in 1997. Disaster movies were all the rage in the 1990s, with hits like Twister (’96), Dante’s Peak (’97), and Armageddon (’98) at the top of the box office. But with its lengthy first-half presentation of the gulf between the upper and lower social classes of the early 1900s, as well as its establishment of the unlikely romance between poor Jack and spoiled Rose, Titanic doesn’t truly fit into the same category as the aforementioned smash-and-dash disaster flicks. While the film undoubtedly played well to those audiences looking for an adrenaline-inspiring cinematic experience, the success Titanic enjoyed in the late 1990s may well have been more connected to the reemergence of the actual ship in the consciousness of the general public around that time.
Titanic (the historical ship) set sail in April 1912 and sank just a few days later after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. For decades it slept on the bottom of the sea until 1985, when Robert Ballard, a commander in the U.S. Navy, discovered the famed ship’s final resting place. The work of Ballard and his team, on a classified mission to explore the wrecks of two sunken U.S. nuclear submarines (this shocking info was just declassified last year), led to renewed interest in Titanic and the story of its tragic demise. Still, it took an underwater-obsessed director with sci-fi tendencies, James Cameron (the mind behind Terminator, Aliens, and later Avatar), to resurrect the Titanic for the curious multitudes in the mid-1990s. In 2005, Cameron explained to online British newspaper the Independent what partly draws him to the old ship and why he feels it still holds value: “The Titanic has a great metaphorical and mythical value in the human consciousness. Is it the most compelling thing in the world when we need to find a cure for Aids and millions of people are dying in Africa? No, on that scale, it’s not a priority. But you have to think of the Titanic in terms of a feature film or a novel – something that touches people’s emotions. Wrecks are human stories. They teach us something about ourselves. A wreck is a fantastic window into the past. Steel can’t lie – it doesn’t have an agenda. These wrecks are like time-capsules. We’ll put parking lots over battlefields, but underwater these sites are frozen in time. By visiting them, we can touch history.”
So, what is it about Titanic that allowed it to become and then remain so successful (we’re talking the film here, not so much the ship)? Roger Ebert asked this question as well just a couple of months after the film was released–when it was quickly becoming apparent that Titanic was a unique achievement in film and a record-smasher. Ebert insisted Titanic‘s popularity was due to the fact that it “touches universal feelings.” He went on to note how the film’s opening scenes include actual footage of the ship’s wreckage, which causes viewers to consider everything else they see in the film to be reality as well. This creates a much stronger emotional connection to the movie for most viewers and leads them to begin to question in their own minds what they would do if they found themselves in the situations portrayed in the film. For instance, if one is a male viewing Titanic, one would wonder, “Would I give up my seat in a life boat for a woman or child? Or would I do anything to save myself?” In short, when we watch motion pictures (or television, for that matter), we automatically identify with certain characters. When we know we are watching something that is based on true events–and horribly tragic ones–the stakes of our involvement become even higher. We empathize more with what we are seeing because someone else actually lived it. Says Ebert, “The buried power of ‘Titanic’ comes not because it is a love story or a special effects triumph, but because it touches the deepest human feelings about living, dying, and being cherished.”
For more thoughts on Titanic and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!
In all its record-breaking magnificence, this week’s film Titanic also has the privilege of being the 70th film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture–which means a bit of agonizing for me as I update my BP rankings list. The films bringing up the rear of my list haven’t changed too much with the addition of the 1990s movies, but several of those ’90s films have managed to crack my top ten. As far as which film is, in my opinion, the best film we’ve seen so far…well, let me give you a bit of insight into my thought process.
Ever since we delved into the 1960s BPs, The Sound of Music has been sitting at the top of my list as the best Best Picture winner. But in my mind, Gone with the Wind is right there as well. Throw in the movies of the ’90s, and the best BP contest gets a lot tighter. Schindler’s List is an amazing film, and Braveheart is very good as well–but Titanic is on a whole other level.
Titanic is almost two films in one. The first half introduces the characters and the ship in all its beauty, while attempting to attach us emotionally to Jack and Rose, the two main characters (who, under the circumstances, should never have met, let alone fallen in love…). The first half of James Cameron’s blockbuster comes up a bit short. The screenwriting is weak in quite a few places, and the acting is painful to watch at times. But the second half of the film, from the ship’s striking of the iceberg to its bittersweet end, nears movie-making perfection as the ship in its tragic demise takes over our attentions. Here is where Titanic‘s supporting cast most shines. They are impeccable. And the sweeping shots of the ocean liner, half-submerged and going down fast as desperate souls fight for their lives, are unbelievable. Add to that James Horner’s unforgettably brilliant score, and there are not a lot of films that can compete in scope or emotional impact.
That being said, when Titanic is held up to the likes of The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind, it’s pretty much like comparing apples and oranges (hence, my struggle with ranking these BPs). As far as visuals, Titanic wins this three-way competition every time. If great acting is the measure of a great film, then Gone with the Wind has the edge. And if we’re looking at what movie comes the closest to having it all–acting, music, cinematography, art direction, and plot–then I think The Sound of Music still wins.
Here’s my full list of rankings for the first 70 Best Picture winners. As always, friendly disagreement and/or debate is welcome!
War is hell. That’s what The English Patient wants to tell its viewers (well, that and a couple of other things that we’ll get to later). All of the lives portrayed in the film are destroyed, horribly altered, or at the very least highly inconvenienced by World War II. Spoiler alert! People die in this movie. They blow up. They burn up. They crash down. They break down and commit suicide. It’s not a pretty picture. Hana, a nurse with the Allied Forces, laments that she “must be a curse” because anyone who loves or gets too close to her is killed. Still, when a severely burned and dying patient is no longer able to stand conditions aboard a medical transport vehicle that Hana is supervising, she volunteers–or, demands, actually–to stay behind at an abandoned Italian monastery to tend him until he passes. When the patient asks why she does this, Hana can only tell him it’s “because [she’s] a nurse.” It’s an interesting paradox: a woman who believes everyone she loves dies and who is fed up with being surrounded by death freely offers to attach herself to yet another mortally wounded human and immerse herself in more death.
Hana and Almasy savor Herodotus together.
We viewers only watch Hana’s tender moments with her declining patient for half the movie; the rest of the film is the backstory of the nameless burn victim, who remembers the past few years in fragments as different visuals and the snippets of Herodotus Hana reads him trigger his memory. Although the patient is somewhat witty and at times even rather talkative while in the monastery, in his past life he was the brooding, melancholy, often irascible Count Almasy, who was on assignment with various others to map routes through the imposing African deserts and wilderness. This mission alone would make a fascinating story as the cartographers are unaware at first that their countries intend to rely on their work for moving troops during the as-yet nameless war that looms over them all. But any focus Almasy may have on his work is forgotten when the spunky Katharine Clifton joins up with the expedition. As soon as Almasy and Katharine are in the same frame in the film, it’s clear that they are physically attracted to each other. The thing is, Katharine is married to Geoffrey, who also joins the expedition periodically. But Almasy certainly never cares that Katharine is already attached; and Katharine herself, despite her declarations of love for her husband, never seems to really mind too much the idea and later the fact of cheating on poor Geoffrey with Almasy.
Ah, yes. Just like next week’s film, Titanic, The English Patient portrays infidelity as true love. Or, it tries to do so. The relationship between Almasy and Katharine takes center stage in the film–dominating the dying thoughts of Hana’s burn patient (again, that’s Almasy) and coloring Hana’s own romantic endeavors with the mysterious Indian-British sapper named Kip. But all the film’s efforts to convince its audience that Almasy and Katharine are perfect for each other and destined to be together fall flat when one steps back from all the poetics and passion and observes that their relationship is selfish, heartless, and ultimately destructive to all those around them.
Almasy and Katharine, obsessed with each other from the beginning of their relationship.
In fact, most of The English Patient can be said to show the catastrophic results of being unfaithful to one’s spouse (or being the party who participates with one who is being unfaithful), preoccupied with one’s own pleasures, and willingly ignorant of the effects one’s actions have on others. Additional spoiler alert: Nothing goes well for Almasy and Katharine or their friends after they start their affair. Caravaggio loses his thumbs, his confidence, and his self-control. Madox commits suicide. Geoffrey attempts murder and suicide, succeeding at both. Katharine dies a horribly prolonged death alone in a dark cave. And, of course, Almasy also lingers in agony as Hana’s tortured burn victim–until he persuades Hana to give him an overdose of morphine to put him out of his misery, his death ironically connecting to a message Katharine scrawled on a wrapper and stuck in his beloved copy of Herodotus: “The heart is an organ of fire.” Almasy let his heart, or what he believed was his heart, rule him; and in the end it literally consumed him–and destroyed everyone else.
For Me Then…
It would be easy to label all the unfaithfulness, death, and sadness in The English Patient as side-effects of the war. If war is hell (and it is), then surely it is understandable that people act differently when caught up in a war. But, in this film World War II fades into the background of the characters’ personal lives. They loom large, and it only whispers around them. It doesn’t matter to Almasy and Katharine that nations are in conflict. If anything, it is an inconvenience to them, especially to Almasy at the end of the film when he is waylaid by the English and suspected of being a spy, while trying to return to the fatally wounded Katharine. Whereas in films like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan we see people reach outside of themselves for the greater good of others suffering in the war, The English Patient promotes the self-serving agenda of two people whose relationship is built on lust and nothing more. It’s difficult to pity such individuals when one remembers that millions are dying in death camps at the same time they are spending all their energy trying to conceal and carry on their dalliance.
As for Hana, her part of the film confuses me. She feels deep affection for both her patient Almasy and her lover Kip, but she lets them both go: Almasy through her assistance in his suicide, and Kip when his next assignment takes him elsewhere. While for most of the film she is determined to help both men live as long as possible, in the end she is happy and at peace with releasing them. I haven’t quite figured out why. Perhaps she comes to realize that truly loving someone means being able to let them go. If we apply this idea to Almasy and Katharine, we get another reason why their love is doomed from the start: it is more of an obsession, a need to possess each other. They cannot let each other go. If there is nothing more important to oneself than one’s romantic partner and satisfying one’s fleshly desires, then life loses its meaning. It constricts and becomes an endless cycle of secrecy and paranoia. And that sounds pretty hellish too.
Well, once more my summer sabbatical for family time extended way past the terminal date I’d originally planned on in my mind…But we (myself and the Best Picture winners, that is) are finally back–and thank you for your patience and continued support of FlicksChick.com!
And now, please allow me to introduce you to our 69th BP winner, The English Patient (1996; Tiger Moth Production, Miramax Films), a movie which often finds itself counted in the ranks of present-day critics’ selections for worst Best Picture winners ever (what a film to restart the blog with, eh?). Of course, we must take those rankings lists with a grain of salt, for they are subjective. Sometimes current reviews of past films are just hilarious: For instance, next week’s BP Titanic actually makes some people’s lists of worst movies ever made, which I find kind of comical. But, hey, not every film is every person’s cup of tea.
Ralph Fiennes as the brooding Count Almasy.
Speaking of tea, back to The English Patient. Despite its lukewarm following nowadays, The English Patient captured 9 Oscars out of its 12 nominations, making it one of the winningest films in the Academy’s history (it currently ranks fifth in number of Oscars received, tied with 1958’s Gigi and 1987’s The Last Emperor). The English Patient took home little golden men in these categories: Costume Design, Art Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound, Music (Original Dramatic Score), Actress in a Supporting Role for Juliette Binoche as Hana, Directing for Anthony Minghella, and Best Picture (it failed to win for Writing [Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published], Actress in a Leading Role for Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine Clifton, and Actor in a Leading Role for Ralph Fiennes as Count Almasy).
Following its Academy Award success, The English Patient‘s subsequent drop in popularity is most likely due to the fact that it is lengthy, slow (at most parts), and tells its viewer from the beginning that its story is just going to be downright sad and depressing. The film throws its moody characters into the gorgeous African landscapes of Lawrence of Arabia and Out of Africa (complete with early model airplanes), but its at-times baffling plot can’t rescue the characters from the actuality that they are mostly unlikeable; and therefore, their plights don’t arouse sufficient emotional attachments and reactions from the film’s audience.
Just a taste of the lovely cinematography of The English Patient as it channels its inner Lawrence of Arabia and Out of Africa.
Despite the fact that The English Patient is a downer, there are moments, however, when the script is almost poetically beautiful. Anthony Minghella based his script on Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel of the same name. Even though it is dense and complex, the book version of The English Patient was a huge success as well, winning several literary awards. Loosely based (we’re talking extremely loosely here) on the story of a few historical persons, namely Count Almasy, The English Patient (both novel and film) joined the ranks of 1990s works chronicling aspects of World War II. The ’90s marked the 50th anniversary of most of the war years, as well as the war’s end, which made the final decade of the twentieth century a prime time to memorialize what Tom Brokaw (in his now-famous 1998 book) called “the greatest generation.” The funny thing is that Count Almasy was in reality probably a spy for the Nazis, rather than the dashing, Byronic hero The English Patient makes him out to be. So again, the film falls short of the heights it could have reached had it chosen to focus less on sensuality and more on the inspiring feats of those who actually set their own desires aside to combat evil.
For more thoughts on The English Patient and its significance, please check out this weekend’s post!
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