1958 boat movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: It's the same as James Cameron's movie about Titanic except Kate Winslet isn't naked in it. There isn't a Kate Winslet in the movie!
You might assume that I'd be in the "No Leo = Bad Titanic Movie" camp, but it's totally not true. Sure, it might not feel like a Titanic movie without that idiot standing on the prow and screaming, "I'm king of the world!" But this movie, without the bloat of a distracting love story and framing device about some stupid necklace, is the superior film about the tragedy.
The best Titanic movie will treat the ship like a microcosm of humanity dealing with the stresses of the apocalypse. This almost does that. It hits all the beats you might expect if you've seen other Titanic movies or documentaries--the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the guy dressing up as a woman in order to have first crack at a lifeboat, the captain's lonely despair, the band playing as the ship sinks--but it keeps its head above cliched waters and manages to be very human and real. The constructed sets help that realism as there aren't many moments here where I didn't think these people were actually on the Titanic. The camera moves a little too flamboyantly to fool anybody into thinking this is documentary footage, but it's not as far off as you would imagine. The acting is good because it's natural. You understand the fears and the loves and the sacrifices of these people, and you understand the impudence of these people, their belief that they are really more powerful than icebergs, without the points being hammered into your head.
Despite how well the human stuff works in this, my favorite two moments aren't human related. One is a great shot of a rocking horse as the boat starts to tip. The rocking horse swoops toward the camera in a menacing way. I was really rooting for that horse, and I was happy to see that it was floating in a final shot right before the "The End" appeared on the screen.
The second was an obvious dummy being used in a scene where they're pulling a child out of the water. I love obvious dummies in movies as much as I love naked Kate Winslets.
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