 There's something almost pitiful about ``Titanic,'' director James Cameron's $200 million epic. The facade gleams. The ship is magnificent. The disaster, which sent the ship to the bottom of the sea in 1912, is impressively re-created. . . . And there's nothing else there.
Human values are either missing or clunkily handled. There's no sense of the power and presence of the tragedy that killed 1,500 people. The first sight of the Titanic, docked in England, is breathtaking. The real Titanic was 885 feet long. For the film, a 775-foot replica was built. It's imposing and awe-inspiring to watch the passengers board the ship, history come back to life.
Shots of the meticulously re-created interiors -- the ornate first-class lodgings, the sepia and brass-colored engine room, the ballroom with its winding staircase -- take the viewer back to 1912. But when people start talking, we've returned to a clumsy 1997 action movie.
Cameron, who wrote the script, aims to convey the tragedy of the Titanic through a tale of young love, which was probably a dubious strategy. And when the happy-go- lucky Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) meets Rose (Kate Winslet), he uses his charm to talk her out of throwing herself overboard (she's engaged to a nasty rich guy). It smells of a screenwriter's contrivance.
Things never get better. Jack teaches her how to spit in the wind. She looks at his portfolio of pencil drawings and pronounces him a fabulous artist.
The movie gives us almost two hours of this mismatched pair before mercifully introducing the iceberg.
All the action involving the ship's slowly sinking is surefire. At every chance, Cameron cuts and intercuts and cranks up the soundtrack. It's all a lot of fun, and yet the film never delivers the vicarious thrill of making us feel what it might have been like to have been on that ship.
The scenes are great to look at, though. As the Titanic tilts into the water at a steeper angle, people rush to the top of the ship. Some stumble and slide all the way down the long deck. The last hour of ``Titanic'' is huge and staggering, but there's no horror in it. No gravity, either. Entrusted with one of the century's monumental stories, Cameron can present it only as a crying shame. And that's a crying shame.
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