Titanic **** (out of four)
PG-13, 1997
Directed and written by James Cameron.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Bill Paxton.

I must admit that I was more than a little skeptical when I first heard about
"Titanic" and its numerous production delays and its $200 million budget. I
wasn't sure how well the Hollywood Happy Ending Factory would handle a tragedy
like the sinking of the Titanic. The laborious effort that reportedly went
into the film made me think, more than anything, that this was another case of
a studio wasting an enormous amount of time and money trying to make a
mediocre movie into an epic. In other words, I expected a way-overdone and
probably irritating disaster movie.

Fortunately, I turned out to be wrong on all counts. For one thing,
writer-director James Cameron doesn't flinch from the unpleasant facts of the
story, namely that hundreds were killed in the boat's sinking. More
importantly, he doesn't make the mistake of having all the sympathetic
characters survive so as to dull the audience's emotional reactions. Titanic
is a disaster movie, but it has none of the triteness and cheap thrills
normally associated with that genre because we actually care about the
characters as people rather than as one-dimensional elements of suspense.

Cameron spends most of his time focusing on the story of Jack (Leonardo
DiCaprio), a young, rootless American who wins his ticket on the Titanic's
maiden voyage in a card game, and Rose (Kate Winslet), a wealthy young woman
who is betrothed to the cold-hearted, domineering Cal (Billy Zane). This is
clearly a marriage of financial and social convenience for the two families.
Rose dreads the life that awaits her so much that she is about to throw
herself overboard and die when Jack stumbles upon her and talks her out of it,
and of course we all know what happens next. Yes, the ensuing love story
between the two and the resulting disapproval of Rose's family is predictable,
and yes, it's a bit melodramatic at times, but it still works pretty well and
adds the necessary human element to the story.

The love story and character development occupy roughly the first half of the
film; then comes the infamous collision with the iceberg and the resulting
slow destruction of the ship. Uniting the two halves is a pointed social
commentary about the mentality that led to the Titanic disaster. The decks of
the ship were divided by social class, for example, with the result being that
the crew evacuated the wealthier passengers first. Due to some cold-hearted
publicity snobs' desire to avoid "cluttering up the deck," there were not
enough life boats, and as a result more than half the passengers, all of them
of "lower" social status, were left to drown.

Throughout the film, all of the aristocratic types casually refer to the
Titanic as "unsinkable," as if it were somehow a fact that did not even
deserve to be questioned. Some of the crew seem to share this confidence, and
this seems to be at least part of the reason that the iceberg was not spotted
earlier: no one was watching very closely. Cameron never addresses the issue
of why the ship was thought to be unsinkable, but I think (or at least I hope)
that this is intentional: the real tragedy, as the film rightly points out, is
not so much that a supposedly unsinkable ship ended up sinking, or that the
collision might have been avoided, but that anyone could be so stupid and
arrogant to presume to have constructed an "unsinkable ship" in the first place.

The film runs over three hours long, but it is never tedious or boring, and as
a result I could go on for quite a while about all the different things it
does right. I will, however, limit myself to mentioning a few other elements
which I liked. One is that Cameron creates some truly loathsome characters
among the aristocrats, but he resists the temptation to send them to the sort
of gruesome demise that has become commonplace for movie villains nowadays; he
is content simply to expose them as narrow-minded and selfish. Another is the
sometimes disturbingly funny gallows humor that pops up occasionally without
undermining the fundamentally serious quality of the film ("Great drowning
music!" exclaims a passenger to the ship's band, who, true to popular legend,
do in fact continue playing to the bitter end.) Finally, he frames the story
in a flashback as Rose, now 101 years old, recounts the story of the Titanic
to an underwater explorer (Bill Paxton). Since the story and time period are,
I imagine, completely alien to almost any viewer, the presence of the
modern-day characters helps to ease the audience into the story, but manages
not to take up unnecessary time or distract from the film's focus.

I don't know if "Titanic" is exactly flawless, but it does so many things so
well that any minor missteps (such as the dumb Celine Dion song that played
over the final credits) are excusable. It is certainly the most successful
"epic" film that I have seen recently, and it seems fairly likely from the
recent buzz that Cameron, DiCaprio, and Winslet may be receiving some
well-deserved Oscar nominations pretty soon. The increasingly "bottom
line"-oriented movie industry does not let $200-million epic masterpieces
happen often, so don't miss "Titanic."

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