James Cameron’s “Titanic” is a film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies. Does it matter that this picture cost $200 million-plus to make? Grand in its follies, dazzling in its achievements, it’s a wild mixture of delirious love story, exhilarating adventure, scathing satire and nerve-rending horror and excitement. Everything we see depends on the special magic of the cinema, its technical tricks and wondrous mechanics and the way they reflect or magnify the worlds of reality and dreams.
Because of its exploded budget, Cameron’s movie has been sarcastically compared to its own subject: the grandiose, “unsinkable” 46,328-ton ocean liner “Titanic,” which collided with an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York at 11:40 on the night of April 14, 1912. And, in a way, this movie itself is like that huge, doomed ship, blazing with light and life, surrounded by dark waters, winds and peril.
But you also could justly say that, absurdities and all, the movies were invented to give us vicarious experiences like this. Certainly no other art form could so overwhelm us: take us along on great birdlike swoops (via crane shots) over the decks of a vast ship on the sunlit ocean. Or balance us on its prow as it cleaves up through dark raging waters with hundreds of screaming passengers sliding down the now-vertical decks that are about to split in two. Or take us down into now peaceful and mysterious ocean depths to watch the wreckage of that ship, crusted over by decades of sediment and lit by luminous, ghostly shafts of light.
You could say that Cameron’s film — a fictitious love story of a rich society girl and a poor Chippewa Falls, Wis. painter, set in the midst of the Titanic’s tragic voyage — is overblown, a travesty of the truth (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). And, of course, you’d be right. But so what? Cameron is not really making a realistic film, though the trappings of the truth and history float constantly around the edges of his grand fancy. He gives us instead a wild romance and a supreme cliff-hanging melodrama, laced with thrills, shocks and ecstasy. “Titanic” is a fantastic experience: one that steeps you in grandeur and terror as you watch it.
The story is simple, though it takes nearly 3 1/2 hours to tell it. Searching for a priceless jewel, some modern-day ocean explorers send an automated diving mechanism down to investigate the wreck of the Titanic. They discover not the stone but an old drawing of a nude young woman. Weeks later, a 101-year-old lady, Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart), calls to explain that she is the drawing’s subject. Arriving at their ship, she tells the sea prowlers — a breezy, happy-go-lucky bunch — her story. (We are free, of course, to dismiss what she says as a lie — or as the truth, vividly distorted by her imagination.)
The young Rose (Kate Winslet) and her mother, Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher), were crossing from England to America on the maiden voyage of the “unsinkable” Titanic, accompanied by Rose’s fiance, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). Hating the sadistic and selfish Cal, forced by her mother to marry rich because of financial straights, deeply miserable at the whole prospect of her life, Rose contemplates suicide one night, moving over the railing at the prow and standing above the water. She is rescued by a steerage passenger, a penniless painter and wanderer named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) who boarded the ship at the last minute, after winning tickets in a poker game (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Naturally, they immediately fall in love. Huge barriers are erected between them by Rose’s mother, the sinister Cal and his bully factotum Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner). On the night of April 14, 1912, the young pair snuck away and dallied, Jack drew her portrait, they were embracing above decks. The Titanic — which had been racing through the ice fields in an attempt to break a speed record — struck an iceberg, flooding six of its watertight compartments. Two hours and 40 minutes later, the ship sank. About 2,200 people were aboard, with space on the lifeboats for only about 1,200; due to mass confusion, chaos and the class structure on board, only about 705 made it into the boats.
The last hour-and-a-half of “Titanic” recounts the story of what happened on that night, focused on the wild fictitious plight of Jack and Rose, who are pursued around the ship by the jealousy crazed, gun-waiving Cal, locked up, handcuffed, trapped several decks below with the rest of the sealed-off steerage passengers and forced — again and again — to break through to the upper decks, in the midst of the catastrophe that will claim about 1,500 lives.
For many observers, the real-life disaster summed up the century to come. The greatest ship of its time, filled with a cross-section of classes — from the highest (Astors and Guggenheims in first class and the ballrooms) to the lowly (penniless immigrants in steerage) — destroyed by greed and errors, great dreams crashing against ice and sinking into oblivion.
Partly because of that symbolism, this must be one of the most wildly romantic American movies ever made. “Titanic” was a mass tragedy — and Cameron and his superb cinematographer Russell Carpenter actually make us feel the chaos on the ship, the tumult and hysteria. But the entire story is so keyed around Rose and Jack, it is as if everything we see gains significance only because of them. This is the peculiar conception of romance and the couple we often find in movies: the idea that nothing really exists outside these lovers’ realm, that they lie together at the heart of the world.
Plausibility isn’t important here. DiCaprio and Winset both give such powerful performances that they compel belief in the most extreme situations: frantically racing down corridors filling up with torrents of water while gunshots crack, or clinging to the ship’s upraised stern as the boat plunges into the ocean. Cameron’s two best films, “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2,” are equally fantastic experiences — though not as rich or memorable as this one. But neither pretends to take part in the real world. So perhaps it’s better, right from the beginning of “Titanic,” to suspend logic, view the whole movie as some vast, overpowering dream.
There are films about the Titanic — like the excellent 1958 “A Night to Remember,” directed by Roy Baker and scripted by Eric Ambler, that give us engrossing and convincing chronicles of the tragedy; the blunders, the hysteria, the lack of proper lifeboats, the nearby ship, The Californian, that ignored the Titanic’s distress rockets. But “A Night to Remember” doesn’t storm the emotions the way “Titanic” does. Brilliantly written and carefully directed as it may be, Baker and Ambler’s film doesn’t make its night explode in terror and wonder.
That’s what makes this movie so romantic: the idea that, in the midst of this tumult — the disaster that became the symbol of the 20th Century’s shocks of upheaval — two lovers and their battle to stay together for one hour more are all that really matter. It’s easy to scoff at this movie. But how can you look at it for long, unmoved? “Titanic” is a vision of oceanic luxury, a glorious and desperate love story, a storm of humanity, a blood-freezing nightmare. As you watch it, you may feel that this almost foolishly extravagant picture gets right to the core of what movies — and popular storytelling — are all about.
”TITANIC”
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Directed and written by James Cameron; photographed by Russell Carpenter; edited by Conrad Buff, Cameron, Richard A. Harris; production designed by Peter Lamont; music by James Horner; produced by Cameron, Jon Landau. A Paramount/20th Century Fox release; opens Friday. Running time: 3:17. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Jack Dawson ………………… Leonardo DiCaprio
Rose DeWitt Bukater …………. Kate Winslet
Cal Hockley ………………… Billy Zane
Molly Brown ………………… Kathy Bates
Brock Lovett ……………….. Bill Paxton
Rose Dawson Calvert …………. Gloria Stuart
