What makes a movie a hit? Whatever it is, it's fascinating to look how moviegoing tastes change over the years. I hit upon the idea for a feature called "Yesterday's Hits" as a flipside to Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops, and I'll be focusing on movies that were initially popular but haven't sustained that popularity. To this end, I plan to ask three questions:
1. What made this movie a hit?
2. What happened to the movie's popularity?
3. Divorced from the original buzz, does the movie itself still work?
We'll begin with the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron's Titanic.
What made Titanic a hit? Titanic had something for everyone — adventure, romance, destruction, tragedy, cutting-edge effects, history, and protagonists to whom audiences could relate. Cameron mixed these elements so cannily that the movie became a must-see, even for those who almost never went to movies, like my grandfather, who trekked to the local cinema for the first time in fifteen years. But the film's biggest supporters were teenage girls, a underrepresented demographic, who famously saw the movie dozens of times.
What happened to Titanic's popularity? Teenagers — both male and female — are notoriously fickle. The movie's original fans are now in their twenties and have mostly moved on, and today's teenagers want to find a hit of their own to embrace. Likewise, Titanic isn't particularly well-served by video and DVD, its largesse diminished by the smaller screen while the cornball dialogue and nuts 'n' bolts characterization become more glaring.
Does Titanic still work? Yes and no. Titanic is a mix of classical and modern elements, and these elements don't always mesh well. Most of the supporting characters are given exactly one note to play — Billy Zane's sneering possessiveness, Frances Fisher's old-money snobbery, Kathy Bates' aw-shucks Molly Brown — which grows a little tiresome over three-odd hours. By comparison, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) are relatable because they feel more modern than the others. It's a convenient way to elicit audience sympathy, but Cameron's more baldfaced attempts to inject their characters with contemporary traits, such as Rose's love for modern art (Billy Zane: "That Picasso will never amount to anything!"), fall flat.
In addition, a lot of smaller elements of the film don't really work. The framing story takes too long to get going, and Gloria Stuart's Oscar-nominated performance as Old Rose doesn't age well. And couldn't Cameron have found a better MacGuffin than the Heart of the Ocean diamond? Then there's the matter of the music. James Horner's Enya-inflected score is even more distracting now than it was ten years ago, and Celine Dion's end-credits number "My Heart Will Go On," never that great a song to begin with, has become so ubiquitous that it's almost unlistenable.
Still, a lot of the movie still sings. Titanic's bravura second half, containing the sinking, plays to Cameron's strengths as a filmmaker (destruction and human chaos). Both the opulence and the effects remain impressive today. And even the old-fashioned storyline plays better than I'd remembered. Cameron wisely stays mostly with Jack and Rose, and in doing so he taps into one of the great themes of epic cinema: people at the mercy of history. It worked in Gone With the Wind, it worked in Casablanca, and it still works like a charm in Titanic. — Paul Clark