I'm sorry I didn't build 'ya a better ship, young Rose. . .

Rating: 8/10 (29 July 2012)

Okay, so let's start with the bad. The script is mostly atrocious. Key characters are cardboard, one dimensional cartoons that are little more than plot devices. The score can be incredibly overwrought and overdone. James Cameron, while a skilled director, is also one of the most ego maniacal people in the industry, as his infamous Oscar acceptance speech testifies. The final shots of the film should have been left on the cutting room floor, and don't even get me started on Celine Dion. Blech.
And yet, for all it's predictability, triteness and recurrent sickly-sweetness, Titanic works, and works well.
Why? I can't really answer that question except to say that this particular love story, which spans an unbridgeable class divide and nearly nine decades, is, for all it's flaws, immensely satisfying. 17 year old Rose (Kate Winslet), of an aristocratic but recently impoverished Philadelphia society family, is heading home to America after taking in the "Grand Tour" of Europe with her fiancée, a Pennsylvania steel tycoon (Billy Zane). Trapped in a (soon to be) arranged marriage and deeply depressed, she attempts suicide by jumping off the bow of Titanic, but not before being talked out of such drastic action by a young drifter from third class named Jack Dawson (Leo Dicaprio, in the part which rocketed him to super stardom overnight). The story that follows is predictable, but never boring. It speaks to our deepest desires and most poignant longings. The love affair between Jack and Rose is the kind of love that, by it's very definition, cannot end happily, and at the same time you completely believe that the experience of those 48 hours with Jack have transformed Rose forever and for good. There's a fairy tale quality to the romance, sure. But what's wrong with that? The story of Jack and Rose is perfectly integrated into the dramatization of the most famous night of the 20th century, the last two hours in the life of the "unsinkable" R.M.S Titanic. A marvel of engineering in it's own time, and still so today, the White Star Line's Titanic (and her sisters Olympic and Brittanic) stood at the forefront of the technological revolution of the 20th century, well before humanity developed the means to annihilate itself with the atom bomb. Titanic and her sister ships belong to an era which imagined a world of endless, benign possibility, where Man might eradicate all nature's obstacles and reign supreme over the earth. Man would become, in short, a kind of God. And then came April 14th, 1912, and a meeting with destiny given form in an iceberg.
James Cameron is fascinated by this night in the frigid North Atlantic, and it shows. The last hour and a half of the film is a close as we'll ever get to a time machine sent back a century to the horrific early morning hours that saw the leviathan plunge over two miles to the ocean floor, and 1502 souls expire in the subzero waters of the Atlantic ocean. While Jack and Rose are fictional, they allow Cameron to remind us, without delving into the "historically correct" trap that would have hindered him if he'd followed the story of one of the historical characters, to experience the desolation of those who survived, while those they loved froze and fell into the void below. The horrible beauty of that frigid, clear Atlantic night is vividly evoked. The most beautiful scenes in the film, in my opinion, are in the last 15 minutes, as Cameron allows his tragic story to play out in that eternally cold, unforgiving icy water (in reality a five foot deep swimming pool, but such is the effects budget that you'd never know), the stars blazing like torches in the sky. This is one of the few films that bring me to "that place", where, no matter how hard I try, I can't help but tear up. Sissel's vocals in this part of the film are Oscar worthy The bookends of the film, involving a subplot about salvager's looking for a rare diamond believed to have gone down with the ship, allow us to see the end of Rose's story, and provide us with an immensely satisfying sense of closure.
In the end, I think the film succeeded so well because it provided two apparently contradictory things to it's audiences. Firstly, it allows us to feel the pathos of this heartrending event, and it so doing, encourages empathy with all human tragedy. Secondly, it allows us to dream of experiencing whatever it is that Jack and Rose had for those brief 48 hours . Most of us will never know what that "thing" is like. But we all hope to experience it, whether we'll ever admit to it it or not.