This movie was directed by James Cameron and this film is to him
what "Schindler's List" was to Steven Spielberg, a breakout
film that is radically different than what the director usually offers.
Cameron was known for the fast-paced action flicks with special effects
("Aliens", "Terminator", "Terminator 2", "True Lies").
"Titanic" has its share of great FX, CGI graphics, but this
movie is much more than that. An action film with the gratutious love
scene it is not.
The movie starts in modern time, with the adventure of Brock Lovett
(Bill Paxton), a treasure hunter and a salvager trying to find the
legendary Heart of the Seas diamond that supposedly went down with
the Titanic. There are some great shots of the silent and gloomy wreck of the
Titanic, lying in darkness at the bottom of the ocean for so many years,
rusted like a metal cadaver. Lovett pokes around with his Deep Sea Vehicles
but he only encounters false hopes. He doesn't find the diamond but finds
a drawing of a woman wearing that diamond. That woman is Rose DeWitt
Bukater (Gloria Scott), now old and living a life of anonymity. She steps
forward and Lovett has her flown to the salvage ship in the Atlantic
Ocean because he thinks she could help him locate that diamond. She is
coaxed to telling her story.
The movie then flashes back to 1912. Rose tells of Jack Dawson, (Leonardo
DiCaprio) a young, rootless artist who wins passage on the Titanic by
winning the ticket at a poker game five minutes before the ship is set
to depart. DiCaprio was perfectly cast as the lead male character - he
is believable as a young, uncultured man, true to himself and the world,
poor yet free to experience the world, his future unsettled but optimistic
about what tomorrow will bring.
While lounging around the deck one day, Jack sees the young Rose DeWitt Bukater
(Kate Winslet), a beautiful woman with red hair and alabaster skin. She is
the complete opposite of Jack. She is refined but living in insincere ways,
rich yet trapped in a life of patrician ennui, her future set but it's a
future that will enervate her spirit. She is the girl that Green Day
sings about in their song "She". She is engaged to Cal Hockley
(Billy Zane), heir to a steel empire. But she does not love him and
absolutely detests the life that he will bring after their wedding.
One time, at dinner, surrounded by the upper crust phonies, she feels like
she's trapped. She contemplates suicide and runs to the stern of the
Titanic. Crawling over the railing, she is about to jump but encounters
Jack, who talks her out of it. She slips and Jack saves her life by holding
onto her arm. They meet by chance.
The movie then revolves on the growing romance between Jack and Rose. Cal
Hockley intervenes and tries to stop their trysts. Billy Zane does an
excellent job in showing jealousy mixed with aristocratic haughtiness. To
him, it is an absolute affront that the cream of society like him can lose
his woman to a man of lower station like Jack - he is exactly like Tom
Buchanan (without the brutishness) when Tom realizes that he's about to
lose Daisy to the Great Gatsby in the New York hotel room. To Cal, it's
not so much losing her love as losing her to a man of lower stature
that's maddening.
Rose's mother also intervenes and reprimands her for associating with Jack,
someone beneath their class, someone who will not help their family fortune.
To Rose's mother, the matrimony between Cal and Rose is an arranged marriage
based not on love but on expediency. Rose feels trapped, in a quandry, but
she cannot divorce herself from Jack. To her, Jack has no future and thus
has no worries - he lives for today, for the sensation of the moment. This
is appealing to her. Even though Jack is poor, he has lived a fuller,
richer life than she. When Jack tells her of all the places he's seen and
all the things he's done, she's enthralled, even though he's roamed the
world like a tumbleweed.
This tightly-woven romantic plot is the main part of the movie. Thus, this
movie isn't like other disaster movies like "The Poseidon Adventure"
or "The Towering Inferno." The disaster is just a malevolent
catharsis in the lives of the various characters, not the center.
Cameron brings in the iceberg, the collision, and the sinking into the
flow of the movie almost seemlessly, yet in the disaster scenes, it
is the human element, not the special effects, that is the most
memorable.
As the Titanic sinks, Cameron does an excellent job in showing the various
human elements that emerge during the sinking: the baseness of the First
Class passengers' obstinate elitism as they demand that the lifeboats not
be filled to capacity because the First Class passengers require more
room than the other passengers; the sense of male noblesse oblige as
women and children are given the first opportunities in boarding the
lifeboats; the of the sense of desperation among the passengers as they
panic and try to swamp the few lifeboats left; to resigned fatalism as
passengers accept absolution from a priest as the stern sinks.
During the sinking, Jack, falsely accused and handcuffed to a pipe, is
rescued from drowning by Rose. She and Jack try to save themselves,
wading through the rising chilly seawater, dodging bullets from Cal
as he tries to make sure that they go down with the Titanic like his
dream of married life with Rose. Cameron blends in special effects to
complement the story of Jack and Rose - bulkheads are shown giving away
to a wall of water, people are shown being washed away, rats are shown
running down the hallway.
In the end, Jack and Rose end up in the sea, battling hypothermia. In a
poignant scene, Cameron implies that it is their unfulfilled love that is
the energy that pushed Rose to survive. And survive she does. Afterwards,
she purposely misrepresents her identity to start anew. Jack didn't just save
her life - he saved her spirit as well. During the last moments of the
movie, we see Rose, now much older, in the twilight of her life, surrounded
by pictures, pictures of her doing the same exact things that Jack had told
her about. The movie ends with Rose dreaming of meeting the ghosts of
the Titanic. Was the Heart of the Seas diamond ever found?
Who would have thought that James Cameron could make a movie about the
Titanic into something touching? A definate "must-see" movie.