Nice Setting, Bad Characters
Titanic Tale Forgets History

If there is one thing I will take away with me from seeing Titanic, it will be the image of the string quartet playing "Nearer My God To Thee" on the deck of the ship as it sinks into the icy Atlantic ocean. This one moment, filled with resignation and compassion, touched something inside me and made me realize how human all those people were.

When we think of the past, especially a time before we lived, we have a tendency to dehumanize the people we read about and see in photographs. Rather than seeing living, breathing people, we turn them into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves. And so it has always been with the story of the RMS Titanic and her ill-fated, maiden voyage.

Director James Cameron has created a film which has done something incredible. It resurrects the Titanic in all her glory and fills her with people, albeit fictional people. Unlike previous films, Titanic does not center on the famous, legendary people who are known to have sailed on her. People like Col. John J. Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and the "unsinkable" Molly Brown (played wonderfully by Academy Award winner Kathy Bates) are introduced, but they merely exist as a backdrop for another story.

Cameron's Titanic begins in the present day, in the Atlantic, where a salvage team is trying to recover a lost diamond known as the Heart of the Ocean from the depths of the sunken Titanic. When the team, led by Bill Paxton, fails to recover the gem, their newsworthy efforts attract the attention of an elderly woman named Rose. She claims to have survived the disaster in 1912, and knows of the diamond they are seeking. The recovery team flies the woman and her granddaughter to the site in the middle of the ocean where she weaves them the tale of her voyage on the Titanic.

To recount the whole story would take something along the lines of three hours, so let me sum up. The young Rose DeWitt Bukater (played by Kate Winslet) boarded the RMS Titanic with her fiance Cal (Billy Zane), the heir to a steel fortune in Philadelphia. Along the way, Rose discovers that she has grown to hate the life she leads. She dreads the tedium which society life will bring, and contemplates suicide. Before she can jump from the rail to the icy water below, a third-class passenger named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) saves her life. Her love for Jake begins to blossom, setting the stage for a romantic triangle which leads to more trouble even as the ship begins to sink.

I'm torn between this predictable, pulp fiction love story and the epic of seeing the Titanic restored in all her glory. Cameron lets the camera become our eye, looking at the details of the beautiful, remarkable ship. The camera pans from the clock on the wall to the domed ceiling overhead, taking in the sweep of a grand staircase or the fine glass doors of the dining room. We become passengers aboard the Titanic and for a few hours we are transported through time.

The story faltered more than once, introducing anachronisms which did not belong in 1912. (I especially had trouble believing that anyone would give someone the finger back then.) I also found the love scene to be horribly out of place. Aside from the fact that I can't believe a 101 year-old woman would tell anyone about it, I think the graphic nature of it detracted from the eroticism of the sketching scene which preceded it.

My main fault with Titanic is not in the storytelling, but in the story. Why Cameron chose to throw away thousands of interesting true stories in place of this fictional one is beyond me. I guess that for Hollywood, fiction is better than truth. In a country where Gone With the Wind is better remembered than any battle of the Civil War, we shouldn't expect Hollywood to pass up a good thing when it sees it.

MY RATING: 6 out of 10.

RATED:
RUN TIME: 194 min.

Nice Setting, Bad Characters Titanic Tale Forgets History

Nice Setting, Bad Characters
Titanic Tale Forgets History