Those Critical Of `Titanic' Now Face A Wave Of Backlashing Against Them

Oscar preview Seattle Times movie critic John Hartl predicts the Oscar winners in our special preview of the Academy Awards, in Sunday's Arts Alive section.

Like all great popular successes, James Cameron's "Titanic," which has grossed more than $1 billion and could win a dozen or more Oscars Monday night, has plenty of detractors.

The backlash began shortly after the (mostly) rave reviews appeared in late December, and it's grown during the past couple of months.

Russell Baker recently declared that he found the three-hour film a snooze; he prefers the red-blooded adventure of "Air Force One."

Film Comment's Kent Jones would rather watch "Starship Troopers" for its special effects and its "semi-brilliant portrait of a fully functioning fascist utopia." Clearly, "Titanic" doesn't have enough testosterone.

"Chick flick" has been hurled as an insult to describe Cameron's emphasis on women characters and teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio, whose remarkable performances in such challenging dramas as "This Boy's Life" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" have been all but forgotten in the rush to condemn him as another pretty boy.

But wait. The backlash to the backlash has now begun, and it's coming from some of the least likely sources, including the ever-contrary Village Voice, gossipy Movieline magazine and the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman, who decries the omission of DiCaprio from the best-actor race (he says it's "like not recognizing Gable in `Gone With the Wind' "). He also claims that Cameron was robbed of a screenplay nomination.

Goldman, who won his Oscars for writing "All the President's Men" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," isn't crazy about the writing and direction of Billy Zane's character in "Titanic" (he feels it would have been "unacceptable in an 1890s melodrama") or the dialogue, especially in the scene in which the heroine, Rose, talks about collecting paintings by "something Picasso."

"Can you come up with another single scene with that many howlers?" he asks in the current Premiere magazine. But Goldman claims it doesn't matter because movie dialogue "is among the least important parts of a screenplay . . . If movies are story, and they are, then screenplays are structure" (italics his).

Because of Cameron's storytelling ability, Goldman argues, Cameron's script merits consideration: "If he doesn't deserve a nomination for screenplay, no one does."

Movieline writer Virginia Campbell recently singled out DiCaprio's work in "Titanic" as one of the best 1990s performances by a young actor. She points out that he justifies Rose's declaration that Jack saved her "in every way one person can possibly save another" - "DiCaprio has, in a careful, expansive act of imagination, given us a character we can believe inspired it."

Rolling Stone's Peter Travers echoed that opinion: "Genuine romantic longing, of the kind DiCaprio achieves as Jack Dawson, is a rarity on-screen." After comparing him to Bogart in "Casablanca" and James Dean in "East of Eden," Travers claims this is "why he's an object of fantasy, no matter how much he hates it."

The Village Voice's Tom Carson, bucking the Voice's originally negative reviews of "Titanic," has paid to see the movie twice and will be sad when it's no longer No. 1 at the box office.

He admits that he loves it because it differs from previous Titanic movies in its optimism and its celebration of the birth of a new order.

"(It) really is about Freedom (yay!) and Power (Billy Zane - boo! hiss!) dueling for the soul of the new century," he writes, "and even though Power cravenly survives while Freedom goes glug-glug, we know which one wins."