Danny Nucci – Movie Musings

Cameron’s film is easy to knock, but is a triumph of romance, scale and real-life tragedy

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Gloria Stuart (Old Rose), Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett), Suzy Amis (Lizzy Calvert), David Warner (Spicer Lovejoy), Danny Nucci (Fabrizio De Rossi), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews), Bernard Hill (Captain Smith), Jonathan Hyde (J Bruce Ismay)

Get on any ship, and I guarantee you’ll see two people at the bow standing, one in front of the other, with their arms stretched out. If that doesn’t tell you something about the lasting impact of Titanic nothing will. Titanic was a sensation: top of the box office for months with the sort of repeat-viewing producers dream of; My Heart Will Go On went platinum and half the world was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. It won 11 Oscars, made a billion dollars and is a film everyone knows even if (hard to believe) they ain’t seen it. James Cameron took an enormous punt on Titanic – Romeo and Juliet meets disaster movie on legendary ship – and it paid off in spades. Because, no matter your cynicism, you can’t deny he created a film millions of people invested in to an extraordinary scale, staged with the epic sweep, gorgeous detail and pounding disaster thrills that channelled David Lean, Luchino Visconti and Irwin Allen all at once.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is destined for a life of dutiful, unimaginative marriage with spoilt millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) when she boards Titanic as a first-class passenger in Liverpool on 10 April 1912. Also boarding the ship (but in steerage) is drifter and would-be artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). When he saves her from taking her own life by jumping from the ship, they form a bond which flourishes into a love that will change both their lives. But not as much as the iceberg the ship is ploughing relentlessly towards across the Atlantic.

It’s very easy to take a pop at Titanic. Its romance sometimes succumbs to Mills and Boon cliché and Cameron’s script has more than its fair share of clunky lines (it’s one of those rare Best Picture winners with no screenplay nomination). Plenty of people hated it in a fit of inverted snobbery as a whole generation took this modern romance to its heart. But Titanic reveals the truth of the magic of movies: it uses a traditional romance to build our emotional investment in the sinking and the lives of ordinary passengers, more successfully than any other Titanicfilm had before or since.

Cameron knew the mountain he had to overcome. After all, this was the most famous disaster since Pompeii: where was the tension? So, he opens with a modern-day setting, a treasure hunt among the real ship’s ruins, with the hilariously named Brock Lovett (a game Bill Paxton in a thankless role) searching for a priceless diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. His only link: the older Rose (a plucked-from-retirement performance of charm and hidden fire from 87-year-old Gloria Stuart), who becomes our window to the past. This allows the audience to be told the geekily excited “ain’t it cool” details of the sinking with the same sort of distance we’re used to thinking about it. The film then becomes a lesson in making us learn, like Brock, this wasn’t an anecdote but a horrific disaster that killed 1,500 real people (made worse because we know exactly what’s going to happen to this ship every step of the way). The MacGuffin is intended to look as trivial as it does by the film’s end.

His key tool for this was his Romeo and Juliet love story told, for all its airport-novel lack of originality, with a vibrant, earnest intensity. Helped by fantastic chemistry between two talented actors, you have to work hard not to care for Rose and Jack (no accident those initials). And through their eyes, the whole ship comes to life, Just as the special effects camera sweep through the ruins, turns it from a ghost shop into a living breathing place, where ordinary, real-life dramas play out in every corner. It’s a perfectly judged entry point for bringing history to compelling life, playing on emotions we’ve all felt: love and fear of death.

The film splits neatly into two acts. The first is the romance and, whatever you say, it’s a cinematic romance for the ages in its old-school sweep. As we watch them bounce round the ship, make each other laugh, dance and fall in love, the utter lack of cynicism is really winning. It’s so overwhelmingly genuine and heartfelt, you can’t help feeling it yourself. Both help each other find new depths: for Rose, the willingness to embrace her own choices, for Jack a maturity and responsibility he’s lacked. Bathed in golden cinematic light and backed by James Horner’s superb score, they become two people we really invest in being together. It’s so earnest and honest it even gets away with otherwise ridiculous scenes like “draw me like one of your French girls Jack”.

Both the leads carry-off it off superbly. No mean feat considering the challenge of making the film – not least being submerged for weeks in freezing cold water during night shoots. Kate Winslet makes Rose burst with life from the depths of fear and doubt, effortlessly carrying much of the movie. It’s often overlooked that Rose drives much of the pace of the romance, as well as clearly being the more sexually and romantically experienced partner. Leonardo DiCaprio – who found it a burden for years, as it turned him from proto-DeNiro to heartthrob pin-up – gives an infectious energy to Jack’s fortune-cookie mantras, while growing in authority as the film progresses towards disaster.

Cameron fills his golden-hued recreated Titanic with the sort of detail we’ve not seen since The Leopard. Sure, his view of the haves and have-nots is hardly subtle (from ruthlessly posh, heartless Brits to plucky, happy-go-lucky Irish working-class), but it makes it very easy to relate to the injustice, bullying and casual snobbery. In Rose’s fiancée Cal, Billy Zane unselfishly plays an utter rotter: a coward, a snob who mocks Picasso and has never heard of Freud, a bully who treats Rose like a pet dog and puts his own needs (and safety) first at every turn. Titanic might be a ship of goodies and baddies (most egregiously in its clumsy slandering of First Officer Murdoch, a clumsy mis-step Cameron later apologised to Murdoch’s family for), but it’s undeniably alive.

It’s that quality of life which makes the sinking of the ship so horrifyingly intense. Cameron’s extraordinary second-half of the film – effectively a souped-up, horrifying remake of A Night to Remember (including quoting shots from that film) – never lets us treat this like a historical curiosity. Instead, it hammers home in intense, tragic detail, the shocking loss of life and the desperate, futile attempts of so many people to survive. Told in close to real-time, superbly edited and practically dripping in freezing water, it’s terrifying in its unstoppable intensity. Suddenly the scale of this mighty ship shrinks into an ever smaller world of fear. Events advance with horrifying speed, as the ship slowly then terribly quickly, disappears, made worse by our knowing in advance every step.

Cameron breathes life into dozens of small tragedies that surround Titanic. The band that played on. The Irish mother who puts her children to bed, knowing they cannot escape. The wealthy elderly couple who lie together while the water washes up around them. The hysterical children separated from their weeping father who remains on board. The priest who spends his dying moments comforting his flock. The camera catches moments of terror in the eyes of people we have seen fleetingly in the film. Titanic drains any sense of perverse excitement at the disaster from you. By the time the survivors are pleading for rescue in the freezing Atlantic, you’ll be as shell-shocked and shaken as the witnesses in the lifeboats.

Watch Titanic with your cynicism parked, and it is an extraordinary piece of epic, romantic film-making. The cinematography, production design, costumes and editing are all perfect and James Horner’s inspiring score takes the film’s slightly mushy romance to a higher level. There are great performances from the likes of Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. And the second half grips like a horrific vice, never letting go. There’s a reason this film gripped the hearts of the whole world in 1997: it knows exactly what it is trying to do and excels at doing it. And never, in any film, has a historical disaster hit a viewer with as much punch as Titanic does.

Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman face off under the water in Crimson Tide

Director: Tony Scott

Cast: Denzel Washington (Lt Commander Ron Hunter), Gene Hackman (Captain Frank Ramsey), George Dzundza (COB Walters), Matt Craven (Lt Roy Zimmer), Viggo Mortensen (Lt Peter Ince), James Gandolfini (Lt Bobby Dougherty), Rocky Carroll (Lt Darik Westerguard), Danny Nucci (PO Danny Rivetti), Lillo Brancato Jnr (PO Russell Vossler)

“The three most powerful people in the world: the President of the United States, the President of the Russian Republic and…the captain of a US ballistic missile submarine”. So boasts the film’s opening caption. This submarine drama explores the truth of that, during a clash of wills (and more) between Captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) and his XO Lt Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington) over the launch of the sub’s nuclear missiles at a rogue Russian general. Ramsey has orders in hand. Hunter has a later, partial, order that may or may not be recalling the strike. Should the sub launch, or should they work to repair their radio and check the second message – possibly losing the narrow window of time they have to take out a rogue general’s missiles before he can launch them at America? Glad I don’t have that job.

Tony Scott’s submarine thriller is one of the best of the genre. It throws in all the clichés you would expect (the claustrophobia, the long dive, the game of cat and mouse with an enemy sub, the blips on the radar, the need to sacrifice someone to save the ship etc.) but presents them with a dynamic freshness (helped by Hans Zimmer’s exciting, award winning score). And at its heart it is a character study of two very different men, with very different styles of thinking and leading. Both rules are juicy, so it’s not surprising that two of the best actors in the game fill them out.

Denzel Washington is just about perfect as a Harvard-educated, committed soldier-thinker who believes in relating to the men as much as he does in firm order. Washington is careful not push Hunter towards being too cautious – under his command the Alabama bests a Russian sub in combat – and he may be alarmed by the impact of nuclear war but will reluctantly pull the trigger, but only once he is certain he has received the correct orders. A lot of the film depends on Washington’s natural moral authority, as well as his mix of forceful reserve and relatability.

You need a big actor to not get steamrollered by Washington in those argument scenes – and few have the authority of Gene Hackman. Hackman is way too smart an actor to make the captain what he could have been in lesser hands – a trigger happy autocrat. Ramsey may be an old hand who believes in telling men what he wants and expecting delivery or a boot in their ass. But he’s not uncaring, he’s well-read, thoughtful, articulate and capable of acts of kindness and generosity. But he’s also a man rigid in his intent when he believes he is doing the right thing – and Hackman is always careful to establish that his intent on launching missiles is because he believes he is protecting innocent civilians back home.

The film becomes a compelling clash of tempers between two men who firmly believe they are both doing the right thing. The film is careful to throw up the fundamental lack of compatibility between the two from the start, even if it is tinged with respect. Their backgrounds, methods of discipline even ways of thinking about their role are different. There is an unspoken racial tension under the film, not because anyone in it is racist, but rather as Washington’s Hunter represents all round a newer America (an educated Black-American officer) that makes Hackman’s naval old hand feel like a relic of Cold War thinking.

But the film is, at heart, sympathetic towards both men, and probably places more blame on the system (an Admiral later reassures us both men were both right and wrong). Scott’s film with its expected flashy style (Scott loves the stark red lighting of the sub at alarm, mixed with the blaring greens of radar screens and the cool blues of sub interiors) gets a wonderful sense of the claustrophobia affecting decisions. Every character is a sweaty mess, while the sub seems to spend half the movie at an angle, forcing the crew to virtually pull themselves through it.

The final hour takes place almost in real time, and covers the pressure cooker of men forced to make world-destroying decisions, cut-off under the ocean from any idea of what’s going on in the world, in extreme temperatures on little sleep. It’s a world of butch extreme masculinity – another way that makes Washington’s more cultured Hunter seem strangely other. Sweat pours off the men (the camera frequently focuses in on sweat-dripping faces). The officers of the ship generally come out badly, with Viggo Mortensen in particular a weak-willed man flip-flopping from side-to-side during the various changes of command on the sub. Many of the rest think little about what they are doing, and it’s telling Washington is largely supported by non-commissioned officers and regular sailors. Perhaps that’s where the true heart of America lies.

The film was written by a smorgasbord of writers (Robert Towne wrote much of the Hackman/Washington arguments at short notice, while Quentin Tarantino polished up much of the rest of the dialogue – no wonder it’s sprinkled with pop culture references). Initial support from the navy was cut off after Bruckheimer confessed the film was not about a HAL style computer trying to launch missiles, but a potential mutiny on a submarine and a feud between its two senior officers. Scott’s front-and-centring of the human drama between two great actors is what makes the film work – and take its place as one of the classic submarine movies.