.co.uk

A few weeks ago, I attempted to explain to my fifteen-year-old sister that Jack and Rose were not real people on board the RMS Titanic when it sank in 1912. I made the point that the central love story in James Cameron's 1997 disaster film was "fiction mixed with a factual event", but she was still reluctant to believe me. So I began thinking to myself: "Is the film's larger than life love affair so involving that it overshadows the actual sinking of the passenger liner in real life? Or is she just plain gullible?" Seen as though it had been ten years since I last saw the movie, I thought I would revisit it by popping in the DVD in hope that I would gain a definite answer.

There's no denying that I did enjoy Titanic in the end. As a spectacle, it is fascinating: In the opening scene, we are treated to various undersea shots of the ship in its current state, submerged with its various treasures scattered around at the bottom of the ocean (this is real-life footage, by the way). As the storytelling switches to past tense, we witness Cameron's breathtaking model of the original ocean liner -- 90% of the actual size -- in all its detail as the two central characters begin exploring during its voyage. Then, when the inevitable calamity does come around (nearly two hours into the film), the fabulous special effects manage to convey the deaths of hundreds of innocent individuals in horrifying, yet gripping fashion. It's no secret that the sheer scale of the tragedy is visually magnificent in Titanic (at the time of its release, it was the most expensive film ever made), and anyone that says otherwise must surely be kidding themselves.

But Titanic isn't just about the sinking of a ship; it's also a love story concerned with a drifter named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and an upper-class beauty, Rose (Kate Winslet), who's due to marry her odious fiancé, Caledon (Billy Zane). While Cameron portrays the disaster spectacularly past the halfway point, the developing relationship between the two protagonists doesn't feel quite so gripping in the first part of the film. I respect DiCaprio and Winslet as actors, and their characters are likable and easy to sympathise with here -- especially when they are contrasted with the snobbery of many of the other passengers -- but they fall for one another in a number of terribly contrived scenes ("Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.") that I felt (sea?) sick as time wore on. There's nothing wrong with using a real-life tragedy as the background to a made-up love story, but I found myself wanting to fast-forward the melancholy and so that I could quickly get to the part where the ship collides with the iceberg and begins to sink (no doubt then that my sister's going to call me "heartless" for such a morbid outlook on humanity).

I'm not saying the romantic element of the script is particularly bad; rather, it is much less engrossing than the epic disaster. Titanic is not Romeo & Juliet, nor is it James Cameron's greatest accomplishment, but I have to admit that it is still a movie that carries a fair amount of emotional weight to go with the thrilling documentary footage and some truly wonderful special effects. The director has managed to resurrect the horrors of a real-life disaster, making the Titanic seem relevant to even those individuals that weren't born to experience it in its actual form. Jack and Rose may be fictitious, but because they get caught up in the middle of Cameron’s frightfully-realistic sinking of the ship, I suppose it's understandable why some people consider them part of the actual disaster. (See, Sis, I'm nice -- I don't think you're that gullible.)

(C) Andy Carrington, 2010.