The long-awaited advent of the most expensive movie ever made, the reportedly $200 million ''Titanic,'' brings history to mind, and not just the legendary seafaring disaster of April 15, 1912. Think back also, exactly 58 years ago today, to the Dec. 19 New York premiere of another grand, transporting love story set against a backdrop of prideful excess, cataclysmic upheaval and character-defining trial by fire.
Recall how that cultural landmark wowed audiences with its bravado, mad extravagance and state-of-the-art Hollywood showmanship, all fueled by one unstoppable filmmaker and his obsessive imagination. Just as David O. Selznick had Atlanta to burn, now James Cameron has a ship to sink, but he also has much more than calamity to explore in this gloriously retrograde new epic. Mr. Cameron's magnificent ''Titanic'' is the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to ''Gone With the Wind.''
What a rarity that makes it in today's world of meaningless gimmicks and short attention spans: a huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world. Astonishing technological advances are at work here, but only in the service of one spectacular illusion: that the ship is afloat again, and that the audience is intimately involved in its voyage.
What's more, Mr. Cameron succeeds magically in linking his film's young lovers, played enchantingly by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, with established details of the ''Titanic'' story. And let's not forget the offscreen drama: delayed release and outrageous costs made ''Titanic'' the joke of the summer. Now it's the movie of the year.
Though the tender moments in Mr. Cameron's earlier films have mostly involved Arnold Schwarzenegger, graceful storytelling from this one-man army of a filmmaker (a director, a producer, a writer and an editor) is the biggest of many surprises here. Swept away by the romance of his subject matter, Mr. Cameron rises to the occasion with a simple, captivating narrative style, one that cares little for subtlety but overflows with wonderful, well-chosen Hollywood hokum. In its own sobering way, the film is forward-looking, too, as its early brashness gives way to near-religious humility when the moments of reckoning arrive. Ultimately a haunting tale of human nature, with endless displays of callousness, gallantry or cowardice, it offers an unforgettable vision of millennium-ready unease in the sight of passengers adrift in icy seas on that last, moonless night.
That Mr. Cameron allowed flashlights into what should have been a pitch-black sequence is one of the rare times when ''Titanic'' willingly departs from established fact. Otherwise, with an attention to detail that goes well beyond fanatical, the film flawlessly recreates its monument to Gilded Age excess. Behind-the-scenes details here, which prove no less fascinating than Selznick's ''Gone With the Wind'' memos, include Mr. Cameron's having persuaded the original carpet manufacturer to make an 18,000-square-foot reproduction of its ''Titanic'' weave and his having insisted that every sign, uniform and logo for the Southampton sailing sequence also be created in mirror image, so that the camera could reverse the apparent direction of the nearly life-size model ship.
Sets match old photographs right down to the sculpture and woodwork; costumes incorporate fragments of vintage clothing; even the silver White Star Line ashtrays had to be right. A core group of 150 extras worked with an Edwardian etiquette coach throughout the filming, furthering the illusion that the privileged past had returned to life.
''Titanic'' is no museum piece, however. It's a film with tremendous momentum right from its deceptive, crass-looking start. The story opens in the present day, with a team of scientist-cowboys (led by Bill Paxton) hunting for lost treasure amid the Titanic wreckage. Though Mr. Cameron made his own journey to the ocean floor to film amazing glimpses of the ship, he treats these explorers as glib 90's hotshots, the kind of macho daredevils who could just as easily be found tracking twisters or dinosaurs in a summer action film.
''Oops, somebody left the water running,'' one of them wisecracks about the sunken ship.
Then the film begins, ever so teasingly, to open its window to the past. A 101-year-old woman (played spiritedly by Gloria Stuart, an 87-year-old beauty who appeared in ''Gold Diggers of 1935'') hears of the expedition and says it has links to her own history. It seems that she, Rose, was the model for a nude sketch found by the present-day fortune hunters in a Titanic safe. It is the only thing of value to be retrieved there. The money in the safe has turned to mud.
But where is the Heart of the Ocean, the egg-size blue diamond Rose wears in the drawing? Rose begins telling her story, and at long last 1912 is at hand. In an introductory sequence mounted on a colossal scale, Mr. Cameron shows the ship being boarded by its full economic range of passengers, from the haughty rich to the third-class passengers being checked for head lice.
Young Rose (Ms. Winslet) arrives at the dock in the show-stopping plumage of Deborah L. Scott's costume designs, and in the unfortunate company of Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), the tiresome snob whom she has agreed to marry, largely at the urging of her impecunious mother (Frances Fisher). The Rose-Cal story line, which is the weakest part of the film thanks to Cal's unwavering odiousness, plays like Edith Wharton Lite.
Meanwhile, in a nearby tavern, adorable Jack Dawson (Mr. DiCaprio) is winning a third-class Titanic ticket in a poker game. It won't be long before Jack is bounding happily into steerage, showing off the boyish adventurousness that makes him such a cure for what's ailing Rose. Aboard the ship of dreams, as the Titanic is often called here, Jack is one serious dreamboat.
A bohemian artist (whose drawings were done by Mr. Cameron) who has spent the requisite time in Paris, he offers all the fun and flirtatiousness that Rose has been missing. This 20-year-old has also shown his share of worldly wisdom by the end of the story. It goes without saying that it's Jack, not Cal, who is the film's true gentleman. And that Mr. DiCaprio has made an inspired career move in so successfully meeting the biggest challenge for an actor of his generation: a traditional role.
Among the many miracles of ''Titanic'' is its way of creating a sweet, life-changing courtship between Jack and Rose in the course of only a few days. At the risk of turning into a women's picture, ''Titanic'' brings these two together through a dramatic meeting, an invitation for Jack at a formal first-class dinner, a dancing romp among steerage passengers and even enough intimate moments to give the love story heat. Splendid chemistry between the stars, along with much color from the supporting cast and careful foreshadowing from Mr. Cameron, keeps the romance buoyant even after the dread iceberg gets in its way.
Comfortable even in suggesting that the ship's lookouts missed the danger because they were busy watching lovestruck Jack and Rose, Mr. Cameron lets tragedy strike midway through the film. That way, the disaster can unfold in almost real time, with terrifying precision on a par with all the other details here.
Not for ''Titanic'' the shrill hysteria of ordinary disaster stories; this film is especially delicate in its slow way of letting the gravity of the situation become clear. Much scarier than any explosion-filled caper film is the simple assessment from the ship's master builder, played with great dignity by Victor Garber: ''In an hour or so, all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.''
As Mr. Cameron joked during production, about a film that pitilessly observes the different plights of the rich and the poor, ''We're holding just short of Marxist dogma.'' (A lavish ''Titanic'' coffee table book from HarperCollins is filled with fascinating data about the film, from the director's casual asides to accounts of the technological wizardry, like computerized hydraulics, that were devised for repeatedly sinking the ship.) By this point, the audience knows the ship so fully, from Cal and Rose's elaborate suite to the depths of the boiler room, that the film is on shockingly familiar territory as Rose searches every newly waterlogged area for Jack.
Very much to Mr. Cameron's credit is the lack of logistical confusion. Indeed, the film's modern-day characters even watch a computerized version of how the ship split and then rose vertically just before it plunged straight down, events that are later re-enacted with awesome power. Despite all this advance information and the revelation that Rose lives to be 101, ''Titanic'' still sustains an extraordinary degree of suspense.
Tiny, devastating touches -- how the same doll whose face rests on the ocean floor in 1996 is clutched in the arms of a pretty little girl who idolizes Jack, or a four-hanky coda seen in Rose's dream -- work as well as the film's big spectacle in giving the tragedy of ''Titanic'' its full dramatic impact. Though many of the story's minor characters are one-note (hardly the case with Kathy Bates's hearty Molly Brown or Bernard Hill's brave captain), the cumulative effect of their presence is anything but shallow.
Beyond its romance, ''Titanic'' offers an indelibly wrenching story of blind arrogance and its terrible consequences. It's the rare Hollywood adventure film that brings mythic images of tragedy -- the fall of Icarus, the ruin of Ozymandias -- so easily to mind.
The irony is that Mr. Cameron's ''Titanic'' is such a Titanic in its own right, a presumptuous reach for greatness against all reasonable odds. The film itself gambles everything on visual splendor and technological accomplishment, which is one reason its extravagance is fully justified on screen. But if Mr. Cameron's own brazenness echoes that seen in his story, remember the essential difference. This ''Titanic'' is too good to sink.
TITANIC
Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Russell Carpenter; edited by Conrad Buff, Mr. Cameron and Richard A. Harris; music by James Horner; production designer, Peter Lamont; costume designer, Deborah L. Scott; special visual effects, Digital Domain; produced by Mr. Cameron, Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini; released by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Running time: 197 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Gloria Stuart (Rose Dawson Calvert), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Bernard Hill (Capt. E. J. Smith), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews) and Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett).
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