Titanic

Sink the rich

Deep sea explorer, Dr. Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) leads a team to search for a fabled diamond, rumoured to have been lost when the Titanic sank. Using both a submarine and remote-controlled robot submersibles, they explore the ghostly wreck, concentrating on the guestrooms of the first class passengers. Retrieving a safe believed to contain the jewel, they are disappointed to find only papers and a drawing. However, the picture depicts a nude young woman wearing the jewel. When he discovers that the woman is still alive , Lovett brings her to the exploration ship, hoping that her recollections may help him find his treasure. Her memories transport her back to the final days of the Titanic's first and last voyage.

James Cameron's epic treatment swept the Oscars last year, as he added critical acclaim to spectacular commercial success. 1998 was a particularly sweet year for him since the three-hour length and huge production costs had led many to speculate, before the movie's release, that Cameron was about to make a Heaven's Gate for the Nineties.

Titanic is divided into two distinct parts; the opening half-hour, set on board the exploration ship, is familiar Cameron territory. The atmosphere is fast-paced , macho and vaguely militaristic, the all-male team is surrounded by lots of high-tech equipment, and the dialogue is terse. The remainder of the film is a more languid affair; a period love-affair between a penniless artist, Jack Dawson , and the fiancée of a rich aristocrat, Rose DeWitt Bukater, which unfold in a leisurely manner. This is new territory for Cameron (just as Scorsese discovered when he made The Age of Innocence) and he acquits himself well. He is helped immeasurably by his decision to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the poor but talented artist and Kate Winslett as a young woman who feels constrained by her position as a lady of society. Their performances, and their rapport, lift a very ordinary story into a touching and realistic romance.

Cameron's decision to use the romance as the hook on which to hang the story of the Titanic disaster is a good one - the sheer scale of the tragedy, and Cameron's telling of it, is overwhelming in size. The script is far less overwhelming. DiCaprio and Winslett manage to overcome its deficiencies both by the strength of their performances and by the amount of screen-time they have together. The rest of the cast is not so lucky. The moral of the story seems to be that the rich people are nasty and that the poor people (i.e. the third class passengers in steerage) were as much a victim of the class system as of the iceberg. This is not a unique thesis. Beryl Bainbridge used the sinking of the Titanic as a symbol of the end of an era in her novel "Every Man for Himself", which concentrated on a group of wealthy passengers on the ship. Though the back story of Titanic seems very similar, it is far less insightful (though I must confess that I thought Bainbridge's novel was over-rated).

I saw an article on CNN Interactive that a video store in Salt Lake City was offering to edit out the brief nudity in the movie (when Rose poses for Jack) so that customers would not be offended. Ignoring the irony of customers demanding an absence of nudity but having no problem with witnessing the terror and horror of hundreds of deaths, I think the video store in question would have done their customers a far greater service if they had cut out the scenes involving Billy Zane. He is simply terrible and seems unable to rise above caricature in even one scene. David Warner is not much better as Zane's creepy assistant (he appeared in an earlier telling of the Titantic disaster, SOS Titanic, 1979). In fact, Rose's wish to escape her old life is easy to understand since her circle of friends is relentlessly nasty or vacuous.

The actual sinking is depicted in a truly spectacular fashion, and Cameron succeeds in conveying the panic and the awful dilemma faced by the passengers as they realised that there were not enough lifeboats. It is obvious where Cameron spent his 200 million dollars, and it is money well spent indeed. In fact, it is a pity that he didn't drop the present day parts of the story since they add little to the story, are resolved in an unrealistic manner and prolong the movie to a near unbearable 189 minutes.

Directed by James Cameron.

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