Titanic Review by Beth Ann Griese

Search Reviews · Now Playing · All Reviews

Starring	Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher
Director	James Cameron
Year	1997
What it's worth		Matinee (Good way to spend a couple of hours.)

The centerpiece of the movie is an incredibly valuable necklace that was on the Titanic. Modern-day treasure-hunters are looking for it, and its story is wound around (quite literally) a young woman and her experiences on the famous voyage. That woman is Rose (Kate Winslet), a debutante who's about to marry a man (Billy Zane) who will give her wealth and wonderful social standing. But he's a boor, a fact which gets made increasingly obvious during the course of the movie. She meets a fellow passenger named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a street lad without a cent to his name, a dreamer and an artist, who falls madly for Rose the moment he lays eyes on her.

If you can't see all the cliches coming just from that brief description, then some of the plot might manage to surprise you. For the rest of us, the story line is an excuse to keep the movie going and help us get to know some of the people on board before all hell breaks loose. The story is the weakest part of the film. To be fair, since the fate of the ship at large is already a given, the story starts out with a disadvantage. But it does nothing to break new ground as it sets up the characters and their personalities. DiCaprio and Winslet do excellent work, though, and their charisma gives credence to a story that would otherwise have sunk the movie before the iceberg did.

A quick note here about the historical accuracy of this film. Word is that even the patterns on the china are exact duplicates of what was on the real ship. We get the sense of the sights, the sounds, the luxury, and the majesty of this ship. Rose even supplies us with a line about the scent of fresh paint throughout the ship to give us the sense of smell. This is an exacting (James Cameron, after all, specializes in exacting) re-creation to surround us with the calm before the storm that we know is coming.

Once the iceberg hits, the movie kicks into high gear, and the outrageous, much-ballyhooed amount of money spent on this production comes to life. Many people complain about the huge bankrolls of films these days. I agree the vast majority of the time. But a movie like Titanic proves that there are some things that a small budget (or even a budget to match the GNP of small countries) cannot do. The huge, detailed effects that make the sinking of the Titanic immediately tangible to us bring home the magnitude of this disaster in a way that's never been done before.

The sinking of the Titanic is a well-known event, but the full horror of it has been dulled by the passage of decades. We're used to a "disaster" taking the lives of a couple of hundred in a plane crash. There's no category left for the destruction of over a thousand people. It takes a movie on the scale of Titanic to show us something we have no concept for. I'd argue the same thing for the worth of a movie like Jurassic Park. Movies with budgets this size have one possible redeeming quality: they can show us things that we will otherwise never experience.

So our two heroes and the other passengers we've come to know must scratch and claw for survival as the full horror of what's happening settles in on them. One of the most fascinating parts of the movie was watching very slow understanding dawn across first a few, then some more, and finally the rest of the passengers. One of the tragedies of the Titanic is that the makers of the ship were so sure that their boat was unsinkable that they let the ship sail with enough lifeboats for less than half the ship's occupants. That hubris extends down to the passengers of the ship, who cannot comprehend that their unsinkable vessel may actually be going down. The rest of the film shows us which of the people we've met live, which die, and how both ends are met, sometimes in tortuous detail.

Despite the triteness of the story, the engaging actors and the amazing sight of the ocean swallowing the Titanic make this movie worth the price of admission. This is one to see on the big screen; watching the ship hover straight up in the air like a skyscraper before crashing back down to the waves will lose a lot of its punch in your living room.

	Web www.bethgriese.com

In the Dark is created by Beth Ann Griese. In the Dark and the reviews on it are copyrighted; you may link to any portion of this site, but the contents cannot be copied without permission.