"Titanic" (12) Nationwide Dramatising actual events when so much of the detail is already familiar is a daunting challenge to any film director; all the more so in the case of the Titanic, whose story has already been chronicled in books, articles, documentaries and over a dozen movies. Nevertheless James Cameron succeeds in bringing the story to life on screen like never before, employing state-of-the-art technology to create pure cinema that is, by turns, thrilling, heartbreaking, spellbinding and breathtaking.
Such is the emotional punch of this extraordinary epic that it is the most familiar elements which fuel the most electrifying charges - the spine-chilling scene when the fatal iceberg finally looms into sight in alarming proximity to the Titanic; the horrific helplessness of the third-class passengers locked behind gates in steerage; the shudder of utter hopelessness at the delivery of the line, "Women and children first". The subject of wild rumours and prophecies of doom as its budget escalated over a protracted production period, Cameron's hugely ambitious film more than confounds those predictions, both as an artistic achievement and as a movie which is resonating among cinema audiences across the world. It redefines the screen epic for the 21st century.
Cameron's entry point into the story is a present-day prologue, a neat contrivance involving a treasure hunter (Bill Paxton) and his team using robot technology to explore the wreck of the Titanic for lucrative spoils. The publicity surrounding his entreprise attracts the attention of a 101-year-old woman played by Gloria Stuart in a glowing comeback as a fictional survivor of the disaster, and her reminiscences cue the extended flashback which documents the voyage and the disaster which claimed over 1,500 lives.
The sheer scale of the movie is evident as soon as we first see the meticulously recreated Titanic docked at Southampton. It is April 10th, 1912, and the passengers are boarding for the journey to New York. One is the 17year-old debutant, Rose (Kate Winslet), unhappily returning to Philadelphia with her stiff, socially conscious mother (Frances Fisher) and Rose's cold, snobbish fiance, Cal (Billy Zane) who treats her like a possession, prompting her to describe the liner as "a slave ship taking me back to America in chains".
A last-minute passenger is the spirited, carefree young artist, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) returning home, having failed to gain acclaim in Paris and having won his third-class ticket in a poker game. One of the few real-life passengers to feature prominently in the movie is the nouveau-riche millionairess, Molly Brown (Kathy Bates).
"It is unsinkable," says Cal of the Titanic before it sets sail. "Even God himself could not sink it." Yet there are some ominous - though never overstated - warning signs. Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), the managing director of the White Star Line, arrogantly insists that the ship must go faster and make headlines by arriving in New York ahead of schedule. And it becomes evident that there are not enough lifeboats because, we are told, the management didn't want the decks to look too cluttered.
Cameron uses the early stages of the narrative to take us on a guided tour of the ship, providing geographical information which will prove invaluable to the audience later. The thrust of the flashback's first half is the tender love affair that blossoms between Rose and Jack who first meet when he prevents her halfhearted suicide attempt, a sequence shot with dazzlingly vertiginous camerawork. While there is something quite rudimentary about this story of lovers from opposite sides of the decks, it is played to the hilt by its two superb young stars - the still-so-boyish Leonardo DiCaprio is a winning, wonderfully heroic Jack, and Kate Winslet's Rose is gutsy and resilient in the tradition of the Cameron heroines played in the past by Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver. The warmth and passion which develops between them transforms what could have been mundane and mawkish, and the drama's pervasive air of impending doom is lifted temporarily by this buoyant love story. Over the course of its three-and-a-quarterhour duration during which the film never flags, the only criticisms which Titanic evokes are minor quibbles: played like a pantomime villain by an unde-rused Billy Zane, the Cal character registers merely as a one-note cad. There are a few cringe-inducing lines such as "Freud? Who is he? Is he a passenger?" And there are a few brief but entirely superfluous interruptions in the extended flashback, when Cameron cuts back to the present and breaks the hynotic spell he has cast.
Those cavils pale into insignificance when the movie goes into its third hour and the consequences of collision with the iceberg. Cameron shifts the movie into overdrive for a chilling spectacle of terror, panic and mass destruction, teasing out the fates of the protagonists with mercilessly accumulating tension. He captures the nightmare sense and scale of the tragedy with extraordinary technical virtuosity, and the eerie stillness of the aftermath with simplicity and compassion.
At one point in the drama, Molly Brown observes, "Now there's something you don't see every day". It could be said that they don't make movies like this any more, were it not for the fact they've never made one like this. This is ground-breaking, dynamic epic cinema, bold in conception and execution, with the vast scale of a Cecil B. De Mille or David Lean spectacle, the time machine quality of a Kubrick journey into the past or the future, the sweet innocence of a Spielberg fantasy, and the visionary ambition of James Cameron at the peak of his powers.
