Sinking the unsinkable
TITANIC Director: James Cameron Cert. 12
You need to take your sandwiches. This is a long film. Beginning in the present day with high-tech underwater treasure-hunters searching the wreck, being helped by an ancient female survivor, it tells her love-story on the voyage which ended in the world's greatest maritime tragedy, the loss of the Titanic in 1912.
The general plot is that, stifled by the stiff and arrogant manners of her upper-class background, beautiful Rose (Kate Winslet) is sailing back to America with her brutish but rich husband to be. By contrast, Jack (Leonardo Di Caprio), the poor, young, boisterous but noble artist, has won a ticket on the maiden voyage at a game of cards. He saves Rose from a suicide attempt, as she thinks of jumping from the stern of the great vessel, and the rest is fairly obvious chemistry. No points awarded for guessing the ending?
Because the audience knows what is going to happen, gloom hovers throughout, and the director has done his best to weave as many twists and turns (including brief nudity) into the plot as possible. It is the world's most expensive movie and truly the scenes of the tragedy and its aftermath are breathtaking. With disaster on the cards, the question the film addresses is 'How are we to live in the face of death?'. Its answer is as old as ancient Greece: 'Follow your heart' and 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. This is what Rose means when at the end she says of Jack: 'He saved me in every way that a person can be saved'.
