14 Love Stories: TITANIC

Happy February!  We're halfway through the late winter doldrums, and that means its time for candy hearts and movies about young beautiful people trying to score.  Don't give me any of that anti-Valentine's Day crap.  I'm single and even a bit cynical, but I think that just makes it better.  The nice thing about Valentine's is that, being about romantic love, there's a whole genre of films appropriate for holiday viewing; the trick is finding the good ones!  I'll give you a few of my recommendations, 14 to be exact.  I don't know if these are really the "best" romance movies ever, and a few of them I'm sure are not, but I personally love each one.

The epic historical romance is a grand staple of Hollywood's history, from GONE WITH THE WIND to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and DR. ZHIVAGO to REDS, setting a story of doomed lovers against the backdrop of historical calamity.  These kinds of movies don't come around very often, and when they do, they aren't always good, but with a filmmaker who deals in spectacle and emotional fireworks, even the the most familiar stories can come back roaring...

TITANIC  (1997)
Directed by James Cameron
Starring: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart, Frances Fisher, Bill Paxton, David Warner, Bernard Hill, Victor Garber, Kathy Bates, Jonathan Hyde
Rated PG-13 for disaster related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality and brief language.
Availability: Available for rental or purchase from most streaming services and retailers

James Cameron's TITANIC is an enigma to me.  By all reasoning, it should be practically unbearable, yet intriguing, but instead, it's a movie that I absolutely love on many levels.  It's not the smartest movie, and the dialogue is at times atrocious, but it hits so heavily on an emotional and visceral level.
The reputation of TITANIC as a disastrous production that went on to surprise everyone with record-smashing grosses is well known, at least to anyone who remembers the late 1990's.  Budgeted somewhere around a reported $100 million dollars (the upper end of an anticipated blockbuster budget at the time), the cost ultimately ballooned to an unprecedented $200 million, and the production was prolonged, missing its initial summer season release date of July 2, 1997, and finally being released on December 19, later the same year.  Writer/director, James Cameron, who had made a name for himself on big-budget sci-fi spectacles like TERMINATOR, TERMINATOR 2 and ALIENS, and just prior, the Arnold Schwarznegger action-comedy TRUE LIES, became infamous on set for a militant perfectionism that turned many of the cast and crew against his favor, and one crew member even poisoned Cameron's and other crew members dinners one night, sending fifty people to the hospital.  The massive cost of the film was split between two major studios, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, and when the running time of Cameron's approved cut clocked in at three hours (not an unheard of length, but potentially risky, due to a lesser number of shows per day and possibly daunting to audiences), Fox requested an hour in cuts, which resulted in a showdown between the director and executives where Cameron stood his ground and the running time stayed.  The press began to balk at the rumors of negative cost and production tensions, eagerly anticipating a spectacular flop, but as the early preview screenings began to create positive buzz, especially thanks to the recently available World Wide Web where attendants of preview screenings voiced their positive reports, the doubters began to doubt their doubt.  TITANIC opened at #1 at the box office with $28.6 million on opening weekend, and it stayed there for 15 consecutive weekends (a standing record), and played in theaters for almost 10 months, from December 19, 1997 to October 1, 1998.  It grossed an unprecedented $600.7 million in the United States, a record that stood for more than a decade until another James Cameron epic, AVATAR dethroned it in 2010 (carried over from its 2009 release).  TITANIC became the first movie ever to break the $1 billion mark at the international box office, and in a 3D re-release 15 years later in 2012, it added on to that gross to become the second film to ever cross the $2 billion mark (AVATAR being the only other to date).  Adjusted for inflation on the all time charts, TITANIC still stands as the fifth highest domestic gross for any film ever, only behind GONE WITH THE WIND, STAR WARS, THE SOUND OF MUSIC and E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL.  It also tied the record held by 1959's BEN-HUR (and tied again by 2003's THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING) for most Academy Awards, with eleven wins: Best Picture, Best Director (James Cameron), Best Original Song (My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion), Best Original Dramatic Score (James Horner), Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing and Best Visual Effects.  It also stands with 1950's ALL ABOUT EVE as the only film to be nominated for 14 Academy Awards, with the three nominations it lost for Best Actress (Kate Winslet), Best Supporting Actress (Gloria Stuart) and Best Makeup.
So yeah, it was basically the biggest movie ever in almost every conceivable way.

In the film, written by James Cameron, a crew of modern day treasure hunters, led by the obsessed and callous Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), searching for a legendary jewel, a large diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean," which is believed to have sunk with the Titanic in 1912.  This offers Cameron the excuse to showcase the real-world wreckage with deep-sea cameras, one of Cameron's major points in making the film.  When Lovett's crew discovers a charcoal sketch of the a nude woman wearing the jewel, a 102-year old woman, Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart) claiming to be the drawing's subject, sees the find on the news and contacts Lovett.  They bring her out to sea to hear her story and to show her their findings, and she offers to tell the crew her story, which Lovett hopes will shed some light on The Heart of the Ocean's fate.  From there, we are swept back to Southhampton, England, April 10, 1912, where 17-year old Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), an aristocratic young woman reluctantly engaged to Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), a hot-headed heel and the heir to a steel manufacturing fortune.  Together, with her shrewish mother, Ruth (Frances Fisher), they are boarding as first-class voyagers to New York aboard the luxurious RMS Titanic.  Meanwhile, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young American drifter without a penny to his name, wins a ticket for the Titanic, steerage class, in a card game, with just minutes to get aboard.  What follows is a very standard story told in a most spectacular fashion, as Jack and Rose are brought together by chance, but challenged by their separate social status.  Throughout their love story, they encounter various famous historical figures present on the Titanic, including the pompous ship owner, Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), soon-to-retire Captain Edward Smith (Bernard Hill) and Margaret Brown (Kathy Bates), aka "the Unsinkable Molly Brown." 
While James Cameron got his start with some pretty original elements in stories like THE TERMINATOR and THE ABYSS, in TITANIC, and later with AVATAR, he's proven just how far you can get on the most formulaic stories and corniest dialogue, by pure production value and execution, and certainly on TITANIC, it's a whole lot farther than you might think.