The film is all artifice, but in the best way

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 1998)

It ends with two young lovers riding the sinking ship as if it were a drowning bucking bronco, yet the unembarrassed hyperbole of director James Cameron doesn't injure TITANIC. The film is all artifice, but in the best way. Cameron vigilantly captures the horrifying details of modern history's most infamous disaster, and consistently shapes his scenes with the ideas of dread, class, and blind arrogance in mind. Despite the rather clunky script and histrionic acting, the film becomes some kind of alarmist masterpiece about an event of painful cultural humbling.
This is large-scale blazon as art, which begs the question: Can the idea of historical tragedy get across in a spectacle, an inherently exhibitionist and factitious form of cinema? Surface pageantry will capsize thematic ambitions without granting a final gasp. Here, though, Cameron's gluttonous temperament binds itself to an extravagant action rhythm with a sharper sense of suffering, and for the first time he seems to understand his characters as much as he does the machines and carnage.
There's nothing enigmatic about the relationship between Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a third-class vagabond, and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a high-society debutante ensnared by her snob-fiancé, but the ripe vibrancy shared between Jack and Rose points toward a future that will never come for most of the passengers. The film isn't exactly tasteful-Cameron is all too willing to kowtow to the morbid fascination of catastrophe-but it feels classy, and the extraordinary special effects take on a certain elegance.
In fact, I would argue without reservation that TITANIC is the greatest visual-effects movie ever made. Miraculously, Cameron uses those effects-and his own eye for thrilling aesthetics-to magnify the youthful romance at the story's center into a contemporary romantic tragedy. The film's final third, in which the passengers gradually begin to realize their peril while the boat slowly sinks, ranks as wide-eyed spectacle that cleverly mines adolescent infatuation as a springboard for authentic terror and nightmare shock. As Jack and Rose cling to a wreckage rapidly being sucked under the icy waves, the moment isn't quite heroic. Instead, their frantic stab at survival makes your stomach sink, too.
ERIC BELTMANN