Gets better with age.

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2005)

It's been 6 or 7 years since I last watched "Titanic," and I liked it even better now than I did then. This is mostly because I'm older and more mature; I found that I could read the characters' emotions better, and guess what they were thinking and feeling, even when they didn't say it or show it in an obvious way. I have to also give the actors credit for performances that gave me subtext to read.
In a movie, acting choices are filtered through the director and editor, and I liked what they chose. It would have been so easy to show characters strutting around in fine clothes, or running wildly around in life-jackets, but the film goes beyond that. For example, one strutting gentleman provides third-class passenger Jack with a convenient model of how to carry himself like a gentleman. Some of the most poignant shots in the chaos of the sinking ship focus on crying children. Many of these shots are only seconds long, but carry an enormous weight of emotion and story-telling.
I generally prefer linear stories without distracting literary devices like "stories within stories." ("The Notebook"'s use of this device was almost too much.) "Titanic" is an exception. Its clever integration of a modern-day story with the main story of the Titanic's sinking impresses on us that *this really happened.* In the opening scenes, the modern story smoothly feeds us the necessary technical and historical data to give us a context into which we can place the drama that follows. As the movie ends, two stories blend together; the modern story is really a continuation of Rose's story that begins when she boards Titanic.
Another common device in movies (although this one is born out of necessity) is to have the same character, at different ages, played by different actors. In many instances, I'm not convinced that these two very different-looking people could be the same person. Titanic's Rose (at age 17 and age 101) is utterly convincing. In a modern, big-budget movie (in case you were sleeping in 1997, Titanic was, at that time, the most expensive movie ever made) I take for granted that the hair and make-up will be styled to emphasize the similarities between the two actors. As far as casting look-alikes, that also shouldn't be too hard, considering all the aspiring actors there are out there. Where this movie really goes the extra mile is in the acting. Old and young Rose share so many facial expressions, vocal inflections, gestures and movements that I never once thought of them as different people.
With all these fine actors, and the obvious ability to capture stellar moments, I'm surprised at how much screen time director James Cameron allows for shots of inanimate objects. As the Titanic's front end begins to sink in earnest, tilting the ship up on end, there is a famous shot of dinner plates falling off a shelf and smashing on the floor. This shot is famous because people (like me) who were obsessed with the movie when it came out know that these plates were exact replicas of the plates on the actual Titanic, made by the same company that supplied the Ship of Dreams with its tableware. I admit that one could hardly make a movie set aboard the sinking Titanic without somehow showing the ships dramatic death throes, but there were just a few too many shots of furniture floating around, or wood splintering that distracted me from the incredibly intense *human* story being played out.
"Titanic" may not be a perfect film, but it certainly was a....um....watershed. "Jurassic Park" showed the world that computer animation could do amazing things. "Titanic" quietly and (for that time period) innocuously used this tool to create shots on a scale as grand as the ship had been. Cameron pulled out all the stops when it came to getting the details right. While the average film viewer might not have noticed this, had it not been so hyped, it impressed people on an intellectual level and helped set standards of realism and integrity in Hollywood. "Titanic" won 11 Academy Awards, and it deserved every one of them.