Writer-director James Cameron is hardly the first filmmaker to put the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic on screen. However, he is the first to refuse to draw any lessons from the disaster. The Titanic was the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built when it set sail from England on its maiden voyage in April 1912. Nobles and moguls hobnobbed in first class, nobodies huddled in steerage below decks. Because its designers thought the ship could never sink, it didn't carry enough lifeboats to save everyone on board. Disaster, no respecter of class differences, brought out the best and worst in the ship's crew and passengers.
The 1953 melodrama "Titanic," starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, focused on unexpected moments of heroic self-sacrifice among the upper classes. "A Night to Remember" (1958), based on Walter Lord's account of the disaster, is less Hollywood and more matter of fact but still draws tears when, for example, the aged wife of a merchant prince refuses to leave her husband when she's offered a seat on a lifeboat. They drown together.
Cameron's screenplay gets around to all of these classic moments but spends a fortune -- about $200 million -- getting there. His script concocts a love story between two fictitious characters: Rose, in first class, who's ready to marry money for her mother's sake; and Jack, in steerage, who's coming back to the US after tramping around Europe playing poker and refining his skill as an artist. Rose's intended, played by Billy Zane, is predictably odious from start to finish, a cardboard character in a starched shirt. Rose, who's supposed to be 17, has a wild streak that can't be corseted, and Jack is there to uncorset her.
This love story builds on class antagonisms -- Rose's mom sniffs danger in Jack -- but uses these chiefly to make us hiss or gush on cue. It's all very entertaining as a first or second act while we wait, checking our watches, for the inevitable: the iceberg and its aftermath. Some moments even achieve power, as when Jack and Rose retire to her cabin so he can draw her naked. (The drawing figures in a frame tale involving the 101-year-old Rose learning that a modern diving sub recovers it from the wreckage. The story is total twaddle.)
But once Titanic strikes the iceberg, Cameron's $200 million really kicks in. He built a near-replica of the ship for this movie and spends another fortune convincing us that, yes indeed, Titanic did sink. Water, water everywhere. Bulkheads swell under pressure. Champagne glasses bob in the flooded ballroom. At the climax, the whole ship rears up for its final plunge. You sit there wondering, "How the devil did they do that?" without feeling moved in the least.
This is Titanic as an amusement park ride, not too different from "Daylight," this year's Stallone eye-goggler which got lots of people just as wet for a lot less money. It may seem unfair to knock "Titanic" for spending so much money. The question is whether the movie's payoff seems worth $200 million. I don't think so. Even with this much cash, a big screen, and a killer soundtrack, there's not much Cameron can do to make the sinking of the Titanic more realistic unless, say, he pays teenage ushers to hose down the audience at the climax.
Besides, there's something objectionable in spending gazillions on special effects which obscure the human meaning of the tragedy. Rose and Jack are upper class and lower class. But the phony love story rises above class distinctions; it transcends rather than clarifies the tragic impact of these distinctions. It's just another regulation Hollywood Doomed Romance.
Cameron's script doesn't help. It SAYS what we SEE. Jack yells, "Let's get out of here! This place is flooded!" as we SEE water swirling at his knees. "It's cold!" Jack says as he shivers. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack isn't much of a help. He looks too young for the character. This Jack is supposed to have spent a few years tramping around Europe, drawing les demoiselles de Montmartre like a Toulouse-Lautrec from Chippewa Falls, but DiCaprio comes across as a kid who just came from his Eagle Scout Court of Honor. Kate Winslet is more convincing as Rose. She has a face a Rossetti or Burne-Jones, two artists of the Titanic era, should have painted, and the actress is more comfortable than DiCaprio in costume roles. (She starred in "Sense and Sensibility.") One proof of her talent is that she can make us cheer at lines like "I'd rather be his whore than your wife!" when she snubs evil fiance Billy Zane for DiCaprio.
Words are cheap. Water, apparently, is expensive. "Titanic," a watery saga, regains the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made from the Kevin Costner flop "Waterworld." Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. All I can say, if "Titanic" augurs the future, is that Hollywood may well end up drowning itself.