Titanic

Romance / Disaster / Historical

If we didn't care about its young lovers, nothing else in Titanic would matter. The lavish sets and special effects would dazzle the eyes but sap our spirits, like an exhibit of forgeries.

Because we do care about Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), James Cameron's Titanic is a rousing success. Clunky dialogue assumes its own particular charm, and corny melodrama springs vitally to life. Even when the special effects fail to seduce the eyes, we'll accept their cinematic "reality" because the movie has already cast its time-traveling spell.

A present-day prologue lends a haunting undercurrent to all that follows. We first see Titanic resting on the Atlantic Ocean floor, where Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is leading a treasure hunt at the wreck site, seeking a 56-carat blue-diamond necklace left behind from the ship's first and only journey in April 1912.

Now 101 years old, Rose (played with graceful elegance by Gloria Stuart) knows why the diamond won't be found, and upon boarding the expedition ship with her granddaughter (Suzy Amis), she knows that the Titanic's fate cannot be understood by "forensic analysis." She begins her story of survival, and in a visual masterstroke, Cameron begins the epic flashback by seamlessly matching an image of the rusting ruin with Titanic's departure from England 85 years earlier.

Here we meet Jack, a 20-year-old vagabond artist returning home to America from Paris. He won his third-class passage in a poker game, joining the Titanic's immigrant passengers in the cramped lower decks.

Resplendent in European fashions, 17-year-old Rose boards the Titanic in luxury, her engagement to wealthy heir Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) enforced by Rose's social-climbing mother Ruth (Frances Fisher), who seems oblivious to her daughter's sullen ambivalence. Rose's premarital anxiety is so extreme, in fact, that Jack must rescue her from a hesitant attempt at suicide.

He ignites her spirit; she is his inspirational muse. Their forbidden love is threatened by Hockley (Zane might well be playing Snidely Whiplash) and by the iceberg that fatefully buckles the plating of Titanic's starboard hull.

For its first 80 minutes, Titanic is a splendid melodrama, as Rose recognizes potential joy away from Cal's cigar-and-brandy snobbery. When the Titanic begins to sink, Cameron brilliantly switches to an approximation of real time, combining action-suspense with the escalating anxiety of what we know must follow.

At times it seems that Cameron returns to flooded corridors to justify their expense, and with the exception of the "unsinkable" Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), a host of supporting characters is relegated to the sidelines. The managing director of Titanic's White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), and ship designer Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber) drop in to underscore the tragedy, but their fate has only peripheral impact.

Tracking dozens of characters is the pitfall of many disaster films, so Cameron can hardly be blamed for limiting his focus. He enhances his fictional story with painstaking attention to authenticity, matching the love story's youthful passion with horrifying class discrimination and the tragedy's crushing blow to industrial supremacy.

Like Titanic itself, Cameron's film is flawed by unchecked ambition, but his excesses are the glorious flaws of a filmmaking pioneer. And because the film's most memorable scenes are also its most intimately romantic, it's nice to know that a record-setting budget hasn't twisted Cameron's passionate priorities.

Review Date: December 18, 1997

Review By: Jeff Shannon