The Boom

Boulevard of broken dreams.

The Great Gatsby (2013) is a brashly kinetic adaptation of a literary landmark. Filled with flaws of taste, it nonetheless has a primal power, balancing F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyricism with a eurotrash sensibility. Baz Luhrmann's direction goes beyond realism—beyond hyperrealism, even—into a garishly ornate romanticism, a jewel-encrusted, stylized vision of the 1920s as distant from reality as a fairy tale. Luhrmann makes the florid hysteria of Ken Russell (The Devils, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah) seem tranquil by comparison. But Fitzgerald's poignancy and homespun longing elevate this movie above Russell's emotional barrenness.

Except for Leonardo DiCaprio (who's looking a little pudgy around the jowls), the cast was too tightly controlled by the iron-clamp production to be able to create human beings with believable idiosyncrasies—the kind of imperfections that allow a performance to breathe. The actors are largely props in marvelously explosive tableaus (New York looks like a Jules Verne creation, and the Art Deco mansions are steely, cartoonish Studio 54s). DiCaprio is able to do more than adopt Jazz Age poses. He navigates the mega-technology and whiz-bang camera successfully, and he steals a great many scenes (except perhaps those with his gorgeous Duesenberg, whose shimmering yellow coat of paint mirrors Gatsby's tailored suit). Gatsby's self-made man (in post-Horatio-Alger America—serendipitously mentored, financed, and launched) pulls you in deeply enough that you're fixated on the boulevard-of-broken-dreams corrupted hope theme, which could be the green light of our collective movie past.

Poop Deck

Titanic (1997) is, in Shakespeare's phrase, "too much of water." The movie sinks long before the ship does. If the dewily pubescent love story doesn't interest you (in other words, if you're older than 16), there's not much else to do but observe the cold impressiveness of the production. The set design is pretty, but you're not sure what's real and what's CGI, and sooner or later you give up trying to figure it out. An awful lot of people are running around onscreen, but they're just a lot of mice against the gigantism of the movie's megaproduction (although a group of them later drown like rats below deck).

Dewy young love. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet

There are good guys and bad guys, bar-room brawls, fiery sunsets, Irish rogues, snooty Brits, a plucky American gal named Molly Brown, and a Hallmark-weepy framing device: the lovely young woman is now a sentimental old woman telling her story to a science team exploring the wreck. She throws her keepsake into the waves and watches it sink. It's all a big blur. Nonetheless, I was able to collect my thoughts during several of the scenes, including the awesome moment of impact, when shards and chunks of the iceberg catapulted onto the ship and skidded along the deck. The two young lovers make love in an automobile in the cargo area, and my memory flashed back to the same scene in Now, Voyager (1942) which, despite that film's exhausting length, was much more to the point. Just too damn much water everywhere: I got queasy when the young lead spit into the wind and it blew back in his face. The passengers who stayed aboard ship after it struck the berg were singing Nearer My God to Thee, in unison, as the vessel slipped beneath the icy waters. I'd have been singing a rousing rendition of Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet in an attempt to keep my body temperature up.

The thing about movies like Titanic is that they're so conventional-minded in their aesthetics & so calculating. There's nothing playful in the entire picture—nothing that isn't worked out precisely and mechanically beforehand. It's an entire universe that exists digitally. How can a story about large-scale human tragedy be so machine-tooled and impersonal? That's what I mean when I say a movie doesn't breathe—the pores are clogged with contrivance. What's wrong with a little surprise, a little idiosyncrasy in the telling, especially in such a long film? Every last element—camera work, dialog, acting, lighting, directing—has had the life squeezed out of it. When the poor ship sinks, it's like a symbol of the entire movie sinking under the weight of its own production.