With Titanic, writer/editor/producer/director James Cameron has hit his peak; nothing he can come up with next will be able to match the adrenaline rush and emotional wallop one receives after seeing this masterpiece.
Cameron has always been that rare filmmaker, one who can make a big-budget special effects feast with an emotional core, and he doesn't disappoint here. While it definately is a visual spectacle in the last half, the entire film is dominated by the rivetting romance between the two central characters, Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater. Titanic is definately a film that has something for almost everyone.
Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), while on an expedition through the wreckage of the eponymous ocean liner, discovers a drawing of a young woman wearing what he has been searching three years for, an extremely rare and fabled diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. Upon seeing Lovett on a news report one day, Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart) contacts Lovett, telling him that she is the woman in the picture. He has her flown to his ship, where she tells her version of what happened on the fateful night of April 14, 1912.
The younger Rose (Kate Winslet) is travelling across the Atlantic back to America with her mother (Frances Fisher) and fiance Cal (Billy Zane) to an impending marriage she'd rather do without. Feeling trapped in her lifestyle among the high society and unable to see an escape route from a loveless marriage with Cal, she tries to leap to an icy death from the back of the ship when she is rescued by Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a poor drifter who won his third-class ticket in a lucky hand of poker. They strike up a friendship and soon discover that they are both lost souls who belong to each other. Fate has other plans, however.
Titanic is as close to being a perfect Hollywood film there has been in fifty years. Visually, the film is stunning; the production design is among the most authentic I have ever seen. It may seem cliched, but it is easy to believe that Cameron & Co. really filmed on the decks of the ship. The special effects, while iffy in places, are nonetheless amazing. There is no doubt that the $US200 million budget was money well spent.
The film would be nothing, however, if it didn't have a story one could care about, and in this department Cameron does not disappoint. DiCaprio and Winslet are perfect in their roles, generating an onscreen chemistry that brings the film a heart and soul unseen in recent Hollywood films. Both actors are terrific; DiCaprio brings youthful charm early on, but in the later scenes dominates with the determination and maturity required.
Winslet, however, is extraordinary. Whether casually flirting with DiCaprio, standing up to her mother or floating helplessly in the middle of the Atlantic, she is absolutely rivetting. Another Oscar nomination (her first being for Sense & Sensibility) will not be a surprise in the least. She could very well become my favourite actress in the near future.
Gloria Stuart, as the older Rose, is fine in her return to film. I was completely unfamiliar with her before the release of Titanic, but now I am very tempted to check out some of her earlier work. Even though she is very subdued and without any phony theatrics, she keeps you glued to the screen whenever she appears. An Oscar nomination is only a formality.
Most people know about Titanic because of it's budget and, realistically, Paramount and Fox may never see all of their money back. It's a testament to both studios, however, that they were willing to put so much money into such an emotionally involving film. Titanic is the best film of the year, despite its minor flaws, and I doubt I'll see a better example of how to make a great movie for a long, long time.
By : Nigel Bridgeman
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 4
After all of the rumors, the negative press, the calamity on the set and the endlessly upward-spiraling budget, the executive nail-biting and the snip-and-fret editing, James Cameron's TITANIC is nothing short of a total success. It does not enhance Cameron's reputation to the status of a Kurosawa -- which I don't discount, it just hasn't happened here -- but he's certainly on the level of a D.W. Griffith. It's the fastest-moving three hours you're likely to spend in a movie theater, and some of the best.
Why this project? I asked myself that -- at first with dismay, and then with mounting anticipation -- when Cameron first announced his intentions to go down there and film the hulk of the ship itself. Now I have a theory: Cameron's TERMINATOR movies were, in a way, about a gigantic paradigm shift. the sinking of Titanic was the beginning of the end of an era, the era of total social stability, of man's certainty of his domination over nature. Now we are a little more cautious, if no less ambitious; just more aware that we can be smashed down quite easily when we're not looking in the right direction. But neither Skynet nor Titanic are themselves to blame -- they're just the agents of man's shortsightedness writ large. (There are various apocalyptic overtones which I'll save for another essay.)
But if the movie's wrapper is Titanic's hulk at the bottom of the Atlantic, the core is a buoyant love story which unfolds during the course of Titanic's one voyage partway across the ocean. And to make the whole thing work, Cameron made some fairly hard storytelling and directorial decisions early on. He could have opted for a more "Altmanesque" approach, in which a whole congeries of lives intertwined and wove through each other on that day, but he shirked that device in favor of a fistful of tightly colliding characters. Everyone wants something from everyone else, and they are going to have a hell of a time getting it: your basic ingredients for good drama.
Winslet's character, both in the past and future, is a solid addition to the roster of Cameron heroines: a stubborn woman with a mind, who's often despised by the men around her. When she first begins to speak of the ship, Cameron very wisely holds back on showing us exactly what she's talking about. "The sheets had never been slept in," she says; "the china never eaten from. The paint was still fresh." Her words in our minds evoke images by themselves -- and then Cameron takes over and shows us what images her words are evoking in the minds of the salvage crew. This is just a tiny example of the movie's directorial genius.
The characters themselves are Damon Runyan stock figures, but again, they're ennobled and made interesting through a unique marriage of writing, acting and direction. They're interesting to watch, just to see what happens next. Jack Dawson (Leonardo Di Caprio) is a young roustabout who wins a ticket onboard in a poker match, and Kate Winslet plays the younger Rose as an upper-class beauty who is never less than uncomfortable in a whalebone corset. Billy Zane is greasy and hateful as her husband-to-be (his love for her seems to be an unholy cocktail of equal parts sadism, masochism, and desperation), and the supporting players (especially the proverbial Titanic deck band) fill out the story's hollow corners and give the movie the feeling of an ongoing slice of life.
Both floating and sinking, we are never less than convinced that Titanic is there, on screen, in front of us. The movie earns such a total suspension of disbelief from the audience that we feel we could walk around the ship in our minds after leaving the theater. There's a requisite amount of repetitiveness in the final hour of the movie -- the ship is sinking, sinking, *still* sinking, etc. -- but all of that is underscored with the terrible tensions of the main characters. We've come to give a damn about them; they make the hoary cliche of the sinking ship into something new.
There is no end of wonderful moments: The part where Jack shows Rose how to spit -- and how to fly. The scene in the car in steerage. The elderly couple on the bed. The aforementioned deck band, playing until the bitter end. And the incredible sight of that ship snapping in half like a stepped-on twig.
It's hard to speak modestly of a movie like TITANIC, which has ungodly huge ambitions. It wants to entertain; it wants to be romantic and moving; it wants to thrill. It does all of those magnificently. Not only that, but it was definitely all worth waiting this long for.
