Did you forget that? Maybe your mind was clouded by the fact that James Cameron is such a sore winner — demanding a moment of silence for those who went down with the ship, proclaiming himself "King of the World," nanny-nanny-boo-booing Atom Egoyan. (OK, that didn't happen.) Maybe it sunk in that Kate Winslet's last precoital line was "Put your hands on me, Jack." (That did happen.) Maybe it was the incessant stream of 14-year-old girls cycling through the theaters that made you reconsider, or maybe it was a simple, violent reaction to the 400th time you heard "My Heart Will Go On."
So it's an understandable reaction. But Titanic is a very good movie — Best Picture-worthy, really — that takes the perfect metaphor for young love and runs with it. ("Of course we're unsinkable, darling.") Add in a crackerjack story structure, totally winning actors, explicit themes about being in a relationship but remaining independent and implicit themes like the dangers of unchecked faith in technology and you've got quite a package.
Titanic is also unambiguous, a charge than can likewise be levied against its closest competition for the Oscar, L.A. Confidential (and even the film that placed in this race, Good Will Hunting). The difference is that Titanic's full-bore blockbuster bluster works in its favor, whereas a little ambiguity would carry L.A. Confidential so much further. Adapted from James Ellroy's "unfilmable" novel, L.A. Confidential was a descent into the corruption that defined 1950s Los Angeles, with a host of star-making roles for its star-worthy cast. It was as gritty as it was tidy, as violent as it was well-measured, and, ulitmately, spoiled by these and other contradictions.
L.A. Confidential is the direct descendent of Chinatown, which also took as its premise corruption in '50s Los Angeles. But director Roman Polanski understood the logical conclusion to be drawn from a Robert Towne screenplay rife with violence, betrayals, power plays and the worst kind of abuses. He resolved Chinatown on the lowest of notes, using his ending to more deeply entrench the terribleness of the situation in the mind of the audience.
But L.A. Confidential ends yea-rah, and even if it is the book's ending, it undermines everything to which its earlier chapters reached. To a certain extent, a pat ending is in line with the movie's one-note pulp characters, offering as its one instance of character dynamicism that Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) allows himself to manipulate the system to whose rigidity he had once been wholly devoted. That could be a great down ending, but instead, Exley's compromise is greeted with swelling music, another instance of staring a great evil in the eye and thinking it's enough simply to poke it. Stories that end like this need a supervillain who's threatening the status quo; when it's the status quo itself you're up against, it takes more to arrive at a happy ending than L.A. Confidential offers.
That said, L.A. Confidential is a great ride, and it, not Titanic, is in my DVD collection. But Titanic is the better achievement, the better movie. It may be the apex of the mainstream, but at least it was the apex of the something. Unike its protagonist, L.A. Confidential makes its compromise, but isn't allowed to ride off into the sunset.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
