I admit I’m not a huge fan of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, Titanic. Still, I have to admire Cameron’s cleverness in combining two eternally popular film genres. Most disaster movies (as well as a stage musical, based on the Titanic’s sinking. that played on Broadway in the late nineties) rely on a broad canvas. Their goal is to cut across social lines, revealing how a single cataclysmic event upends the lives of a wide swath of people from various backgrounds and economic levels. Some survive; some die; life goes on. (In the case of the Broadway musical, there are a lot of forgettable ballads along the way. And I cannot remember a single character who actually stood out from the throng.)
Cameron’s take on the sinking of the huge British ocean liner by an iceberg while on its 1912 maiden voyage is not entirely different from what I’ve described above. There’s a cast of what seem like thousands, and class differences are very much a part of the story. But Cameron is smart enough (as both the film’s screenwriter and its director) not to spread his gaze too wide. Instead, he combines his disaster film with a strong focus on a single couple of his own invention, two attractive young people from very different social circumstances who meet aboard the doomed ship and violate social norms by falling passionately in love. So the disaster film is combined with a doomed romance that audiences around the world quickly took to their hearts.
Cameron’s talent for genre-mashing did not begin with Titanic. In 1994, he released a film with a wonderfully oxymoronic title: True Lies. In its opening moments, it’s easy to think of a James Bond thriller. There’s a lordly European manor, dusted with snow. While inside well-dressed couples dance and shmooze, a man encased in what looks like a SCUBA suit is descending through the icy grounds on the perimeter. Somehow he surfaces inside the manor, where he quickly peels off the SCUBA gear and appears, sleek and slim, in a dapper tuxedo. Quickly he’s inside the party, making small-talk with guests and engaging one particular lovely in a sexy tango. OMG—it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it’s pretty clear he’s a spy in the Sean Connery mode.
But we’re not exactly in James Bond territory. Once he’s done with the mission, which involves checking out a Middle Eastern terrorist group called the Crimson Jihad, Arnold’s Harry Tasker returns home to the DC suburbs to rejoin his wife Helen, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Knowing nothing about her husband’s days as a counter-terrorism expert working under deep cover for the U.S. government, she assumes he’s a mild-mannered computer salesman whose life is totally lacking in excitement. And, frankly, she could use some excitement. Which is why she’s vulnerable to the advances of a would-be man of mystery (he’s wonderfully played by Bill Paxton). And this of course is what prompts Harry to stop saving the world, at least temporarily, in order to focus instead on winning back his wife, by any means necessary. There’s much hilarity in this classic domestic comedy, which eventually folds in the defeat of the bad guys and a wonderfully satisfying (and sexy) ending sequence.
Schwarzenegger, who had starred in Cameron’s career-making—and hardly funny—The Terminator (1984) shows himself here to be a polished comic actor. And I can’t say enough about Jamie Lee Curtis, whose transformation from bored housewife to would-be vamp is hilariously funny. At some moments she reminded me of the great Carol Burnett, who made awkwardness into an artform. Bravo to all!
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