See-Worthy Spectacle -- See-Worthy Spectacle -- Cameron's Epic `Titanic' Captures That Sinking Feeling

Movie review XXX 1/2 "Titanic," with Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Suzy Amis, Bill Paxton, Gloria Stuart. Directed and written by James Cameron. 194 minutes. Several theaters. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of language, violence, horrific scenes, brief nudity.

No matter what you ultimately think of it, James Cameron's "Titanic" is something to see. Like mountains and John Wayne, it is there.

The presence of the ship is felt as never before on film. Whether we're looking at the wreck as it sits on the ocean floor today, or we're being transported back to its first and only voyage in 1912, or we're watching it being flooded floor by floor after striking an iceberg, we finally understand why it was the wonder of its age.

No other film has made the horror of the ship's sinking so palpable, and none other has dared to dramatize the night of the living dead that followed after it sank beneath the North Atlantic. Survivors have often said that the worst part of the disaster was listening to the screams of freezing people, stranded in the water in the moonless early morning of April 15.

Cameron doesn't flinch at this point. He stays with the guilty people in the lifeboats and the near-corpses struggling in their lifejackets in water so cold it forms ice on their faces. He doesn't discreetly look away - and that helps to make his film uniquely memorable. Unlike the jokey horrors of "Scream 2," the deaths in this movie count.

And a good thing, too. The plot of Cameron's $200 million epic is a familiar melodrama, driven by the miscast Billy Zane, who seems to have been inspired to give a "period" performance that might have been appropriate in a silent film of 1912.

His cardboard villain, an upper-class twit named Caledon Hockley, seems merely ludicrous. He often gets in the way of the doomed love story developing between his spoiled fiancee, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), and a penniless painter, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who shares her enthusiasm for art.

Winslet, DiCaprio to the rescue

This fictional Romeo-and-Juliet relationship, condemned by the adults except for the nouveau-riche Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), could have trivialized the Titanic disaster, and when Hockley is threatening the two infatuated children, it comes close. But Winslet and DiCaprio rescue the situation time and again. Rose and Jack are more like brother and sister than lovers, and their tame sex scene seems little more than a concession to late-20th-century audiences, but the actors make the bond between credible and poignant.

In a framing device that begins and ends the film, Gloria Stuart plays Rose as an aging survivor who tells the story of that night to a fortune hunter (Bill Paxton) and his crew, who have found Dawson's sketch of her in the wreck. The teenage Rose and the 101-year-old Rose are clearly the same person; the character's younger and older selves are joined by a series of exquisitely designed dissolves between the new and the old Titanic.

Technically terrific

Technically, "Titanic" is a marvel. Almost as large as the original Titanic, the ship Cameron built in Mexico is an imposing palace, and he makes the most of the characters' trips through its cavernous boiler room and lavish ballrooms. Computer-generated effects are used for many shots, but they rarely call attention to themselves. Music can help make an illusion complete, and James Horner's lush, urgent score helps to make the blend appear nearly seamless.

"A Night to Remember," which is nearly 40 years old now, may still be the best Titanic movie, in terms of its scope, its accuracy and its wide-ranging concern with so many aspects of the disaster (Cameron seems uninterested in the ships nearby, one of which could have saved the Titanic's passengers).

But that movie looks almost genteel in comparison to Cameron's achievement. Size and spectacle do count for something here (too bad it's not showing at the Cinerama, where the press screening was held last week). So does the romantic fervor of its lovers, who are too young to comprehend that they, too, are mortal.