Titanic

James Cameron’s career-defining picture is as powerful a film about excess as the modern cinema era created. Titanic is impeccably structured, beautifully designed, brilliantly acted, and magically directed. The monstrous movie is one of the highest grossing pictures of all time and scooped eleven Academy Awards after whispers that it would fail and cause the downfall of Paramount.

Titanic is Cameron’s labour of love, a lyrical piece of art produced on a massive scale utilizing elements of romance, loss, excess, and social class to tell a story of mankind’s attempt to triumph over the elements. In effect, that is what the story of the Titanic represents. It is the ultimate tale of arrogance, as the “unsinkable ship” still remains a grim reminder of how little we know and how little chance we stand against nature, accident, and ourselves.

In the middle of this, Cameron smartly structures a love story. Leonardo DiCaprio is Jack Dawson, a drifter and artist who wins a ticket to board the Titanic in a poker game. He boards and is enamoured with the entire experience, feasting his eyes on the grandeur and experiencing the scope of it all. It isn’t long before he lays his eyes upon 17-year-old Rose (Kate Winslet) and is quickly swept up in her beauty. Rose is on board with her fiancé Cal (Billy Zane), a dreadfully evil and self-absorbed rich heir to a steel fortune. Needless to say, Rose isn’t particularly excited about her impending doom.

Rose feels hopelessly swept up in the boredom and repetitiveness of her life and feels that there is no way to avoid what’s coming, so she sets out to kill herself by leaping into the water off of the Titanic. Jack saves her and the two develop a relationship much to the chagrin of Cal and Rose’s unfortunate mother (Frances Fisher). Jack and Rose soon begin a love affair that takes them up until the fateful moment when the massive vessel runs into the auspicious iceberg and all hell breaks loose.

Titanic works because it is a richly detailed and filled with romance, adventure, and suspense. Cameron delivers the historical story sandwiched in the middle of a modern day connection. We meet 101-year-old Rose (Gloria Stuart) as she tells treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) of her adventures on the ship. The use of this as a way to connect the story to modern times is clever and ultimately necessary, as it gives us a way to attach the ostensibly remote events of the past to our more immediate sensibility.

Cameron, tremendous ego aside, really did a marvellous job with the project. His obsessive detail shows in each scene, as his interest in shipwrecks really resonates on the screen. His use of Lovett as a character to grant an entry point to those without one is smart, as is his focus on the love story and the differing social classes. By granting several points of interest and layering his story well, Cameron’s screenplay is stylish and rich with detail.

The performances are grand, with Kate Winslet standing out with a phenomenal performance as Rose. She is desperately beautiful, infusing every scene with a combination of raw sensuality and beautiful grace. Even as she traipses through the waters below to save her lover from certain doom, even as her lungs freeze, even as she urgently attempts to escape her circumstances, Winslet is ever the picture of gorgeous beauty. Her emotional range is captivating and her eloquence is extraordinary.

Cameron’s Titanic is legendary and should be required viewing for, well, everyone. It is massive, gorgeous, romantic, suspenseful, and endlessly entertaining. While he may be a complete dick to work with (whether he’s firing people for going to the bathroom on True Lies or freezing poor Kate in for Titanic), his projects are almost always interesting and his military-style dedication is unquestionable. For a clear vision of what this asshole can do, Titanic is as good as it gets.

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