Titanic (1997 film)

Titanic
File:Titanic poster.jpg Original theatrical poster for Titanic
Directed by	James Cameron
Written by	James Cameron
Produced by	James Cameron Jon Landau
Starring	Leonardo DiCaprio Kate Winslet Frances Fisher Danny Nucci Bill Paxton Gloria Stuart Billy Zane
Cinematography	Russell Carpenter
Edited by	Conrad Buff IV James Cameron Richard A. Harris
Music by	James Horner
Distributed by	20th Century Fox (non-United States) Paramount Pictures (United States)
Release date	December 19 1997
Running time	194 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$200,000,000
Box office	US$1,845,034,188 (worldwide)

Titanic is a romantic drama film written, directed and co-produced by James Cameron. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater, members of different social strata who fall in love aboard the 1912 maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. The film co-stars Billy Zane as Bukater's fiancé, Frances Fisher as Bukater's mother, and Danny Nucci as Dawson's best friend. Bill Paxton plays the leader of a treasure hunting expedition, while Gloria Stuart has the role of the elderly Bukater (renamed Calvert), who narrates the story in 1996.

Because Titanic was not completed in mid-1997, problems rose in Hollywood and there was discussion of trimming its length, but director Cameron fought to release it without additional editing. It was released to North American theatres by Paramount Pictures on December 19 1997, and while it performed well in its first weekend, it was not until the new year that the film would reach its highest ticket sales. It holds the record for the highest-grossing film of all time, generating over US$1.8 billion worldwide. In 1998 it was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and won eleven, including the title of 1997's "Best Picture". With Ben-Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Titanic holds the record for the most Academy Award wins.

Production

When this epic disaster film was not finished in time for its scheduled July 1997 release, shockwaves were sent through Hollywood; executives started wondering if a situtation similar to that of Heaven's Gate would occur. The releasing studios 20th Century Fox (which handled the film's distribution outside the U.S.) and Paramount (which handled the U.S. distribution) panicked. With a budget of $240 million, Titanic became the costliest film of all time by mid-1997. When director James Cameron delivered the film to Paramount, it ran over three hours and speculation arose whether he would work in Hollywood again. Cameron defended his production and threatened most executives that they were not going to shorten the film's length. Cameron admitted that he felt as though Titanic would be unsuccessful.

Titanic was released across North America on December 19 1997. In its first weekend it grossed $28 million in ticket sales, but it was not until the new year that the film had reached $100 million. Titanic was number-one at the box office for four months and became the top-grossing film of all time. It generated $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. In 1998 Cameron was awarded the Academy Award for "Best Picture".

Plot

Template:Spoiler The year is 1996, and a treasure hunter and his team explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic in their submersible. A safe is brought to the surface and is opened. It contains, not the fabled treasure the adventurers had hoped for, but only papers. One of them is a pencil portrait dated April 14, 1912, and signed "JD". It shows a beautiful young woman reclining nude with casual modesty on a couch. On a necklace around her is the treasure they seek: the diamond "The Heart of the Ocean".

Rose DeWitt Bukater, known as Rose Dawson Calvert, an ancient but still lively woman of 101 years, watches a CNN report of the treasure hunt and sees the nude portrait. She phones the treasure hunter Brock Lovett and informs him that she knows about the diamond, the Heart of the Ocean, and also the identity of the beautiful young woman in the portrait: "Oh, yes. The woman in the picture is me." Rose, accompanied by her granddaughter Lizzy Calvert, flies out to the recovery site and proceeds to tell the treasure hunters of her experiences on the Titanic.

Rose, seventeen-years-old in April 1912, boards the ship with the upper-class passengers and her mother, society matron Ruth DeWitt Bukater, and her fiancé, industrialist Caledon Hockley. While Rose merely considers Caledon as a friend but not a suitable husband, her uncaring mother pushes for the marriage for financial security, to maintain their current lavish lifestyle and bolster the social cachet among the Philadelphia elite. Meanwhile, a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson and his best friend Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets to the ship in a poker game.

Rose is so unhappy about her forced engagement as well as her endlessly shallow life, that she attempts to kill herself by jumping off the stern of the ship. Jack sees her and intervenes to prevent her suicide. The ship's crew find the two sprawled over the deck. At first they think this is a rape, but Rose explains to them that it was an accident. Caledon comes and thanks Jack by reluctantly inviting him to dine with their party the following evening in the first-class dining saloon. In the meantime, Rose and Jack soon strike up a tentative friendship as he shares tales of his adventures in traveling and she expresses her own hopes, and he shows her his sketchbook of artwork. Their bond deepens when they later ditch the first-class formal dinner party for a much livelier gathering below decks in third-class along with Fabrizio and Tommy Ryan, a man Jack and Fabrizio befriended earlier on.

File:Titanic Movie Leo Kate Kiss.jpg

Jack and Rose kiss on the bow of the Titanic. The ship would begin sinking late that evening.

Jack is falling in love with Rose, but she is inclined to ignore their growing affection because of her engagement and social standings. Eventually, she decides to offer her heart to Jack and asks him to sketch her wearing nothing but the Heart of the Ocean diamond. Unfortunately, Rose foolishly writes a taunting note for Caledon and puts it in the diamond's safe along with the drawing and the diamond itself. They later consummate their relationship in one of the ship's cargo hold cars, after being pursued by Spicer Lovejoy, Caledon's valet.

In the meantime, Captain Edward J. Smith and his crew have been seemingly ignoring many warnings about upcoming ice fields in the ship's path, and the Titanic maintains the high speed suggested by White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay even as the ship heads into the night. On the night of April 14 1912, the two lookouts see an iceberg directly in the Titanic's path. Despite the many efforts of the crew and engineers, the ship strikes the iceberg and water begins to flood the compartments past their "unsinkable" capacity and causes the ship to begin sinking.

After finding Rose's taunt note in the diamond safe, Caledon discovers the relationship between Jack and Rose and gets even by framing Jack for stealing his diamond. Caledon then orders the Master-at-Arms to handcuff and trap Jack in a room. Even though she has a chance to escape the sinking ship early on with her mother, Rose runs away from Caledon — and her chance of getting into a lifeboat — to find Jack. She frees Jack and they try desperately to make their way back above decks to escape the rapidly sinking ship. While making their way to the boat deck, they encounter a locked door, and burst through to a naive steward's dismay. They then try to get to a stairwell, but the steward's there and so many of the steerage passengers spend many of their last hours locked under gates, but Jack and Rose work their way to a smaller gate, where they are reunited with Fabrizio and Tommy. There they use a bench to break down the gate, gaining access to the upper level. Finally the group makes it up to the boat deck where Caledon is already on the search for Rose.

However, the ship's officers aren't letting any men on the lifeboats, and Rose refuses to get into a lifeboat without Jack. As Fabrizio and Tommy go off to check the other side, Jack and Caledon, who has been spending all night trying to find Rose and get into a lifeboat, temporarily team up to convince Rose to get into the lifeboat, which she does. While they were trying to convince her, Caledon gave his coat to Rose to keep her warm, forgetting that he had put the Heart of the Ocean in the pocket. When the lifeboat starts to lower away from the ship, Rose realizes that she can't separate herself from Jack, and she jumps back on the ship, and she and Jack reunite on the Grand Staircase, with Caledon and Lovejoy witnessing all of this. Infuriated beyond belief, Caledon takes Lovejoy's handgun and chases Jack and Rose down the staircase, shooting at them the entire time. Caledon runs out of ammunition when Jack and Rose reach the Dining Room, which is quickly flooding. He chooses not to continue pursuing them when he notices the water level. Then he starts to laugh. Lovejoy, who was following behind Caledon, asks, "What could possibly be funny?" Caledon says, "I put the diamond in the coat — and I put the coat on her!" Jack and Rose try to make their way to the boat deck again, during which they unsuccessfully attempt to rescue a child in a flooding hallway, and they nearly drown behind a locked gate.

Meanwhile, Caledon has bribed his way into the last lifeboat, with Jack's friends, Tommy Ryan and Fabrizio De Rossi, trying to get into the boat themselves. First officer William McMaster Murdoch, the officer in charge of launching the boat, threatens to shoot any man who tries to get into the boat, allowing only women and children into the boat. He rejects Caledon's bribe. The crowd pushes Tommy toward the boat and he gets shot by Murdoch. When Murdoch realizes that he just killed an innocent man, he looks around in shock before committing suicide by shooting himself in the head. Caledon gets into the lifeboat by pretending to look after an abandoned child. The water reaches the boat deck, and the lifeboat floats off the deck. Fabrizio gets washed into the water and gets killed when the ship's forward funnel topples over.

Jack and Rose finally make their way to the top deck, but Jack sees that the lifeboats are gone and they, along with 1,500 terrified passengers and crew, have no choice but to head aft and stay on the ship for as long as possible before the Titanic sinks completely into the water. When they make it to the back of the stern, the deck is becoming harder to walk on because of the tilt of the ship. People begin to jump overboard, trying to swim to the lifeboats, but most of them don't make it and end up dying in the freezing cold water. Eventually, the ship's tilt is so steep that anybody not holding onto anything (deck railing, benches, lifeboat davits, etc.) slides down the deck into the water. The stern of the ship rises higher and higher until its weight causes the ship to break in two. The two sections are still attached at the keel, however, and the bow, which by now is completely flooded, goes under and pulls the stern upright so it is at a 90 degree angle. Jack and Rose have made it to the very aft deck railing, at the "top" of the stern and ready themselves for the final plunge. Eventually, the ship begins its final descent and everyone, including Jack and Rose, are washed into the cold, icy waters of the North Atlantic at 2:20 AM on April 15.

Rose and Jack stick together and wait with the hundreds of other passengers thrashing helplessly in the water, shouting desperately for those in the lifeboats to row back to rescue them. By the time one of the officers decides to row back and help those in need, almost all of the passengers have died of hypothermia in the freezing Atlantic Ocean.

Rose is heartbroken to realize that Jack has succumbed, as well. She bids him goodbye, then manages to get the lifeboat's attention to come back and rescue her. The survivors in the lifeboats wait for hours until the RMS Carpathia, the closest ship to answer and heed the Titanic's radio distress signals, arrives to save them. Upon arrival at New York City, Rose discovers that she still has the Heart of the Ocean tucked into the pocket of Caledon's coat.

As an old woman in 1996, Rose now goes onto the deck of the Keldysh (the salvage ship) and throws the Heart of the Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean where Jack died.

Back in Rose's room, the viewers sees pictures of her life's achievements, including a photograph of her riding a horse at the Santa Monica Pier, just as she and Jack had planned to do together. There is also a roller coaster in the background of this picture, another reference to the plans that she and Jack made. Rose lies in a bed nearby, a scene where some fans have debated whether she is asleep or has passed away.

A promise kept?

One of the biggest controversies in the film questions whether old Rose died or was dreaming at the end of the film. A possible indication that she died is given by the chapter title in the DVD "A Promise Kept". While Rose and Jack were floating in the freezing water, Jack made her promise that she wouldn't die in the water:

Listen, Rose. You're going to get out of here. You're going to go on. And you're going to make lots of babies, and you're going watch them grow. You're going die an old, old lady, warm in her bed. Not here. Not this night. Not like this. Do you understand me?... You -- You must do me this honor. You must promise me. That you'll survive. That you won't give up, no matter what happens. No matter how hopeless. Promise me now, Rose. And never let go of that promise.

However, there is no publicly solidified answer. Cameron is quoted in his commentary toward the end of the film refusing to give away the ending as a way of keeping the film open-ended and exciting for the viewer:

Now, of course, the big ambiguity here is, 'Is she alive, and dreaming?', or 'Is she dead, and on her way to Titanic heaven, here?' And of course, I'll never tell. I mean, I know what we intended at the time. But that doesn't mean I have to go blurting it out. So, I know you've gone and bought this, you know, expensive special edition DVD, and you were, you know, hoping for the answer. But, the answer is, has to be something that you supply personally, individually.

Underwater, the decaying Titanic looms out of the darkness and fades to new again. A steward opens the doors from the promenade deck to the Grand Staircase, where all those who had died on the ship smile in greeting. At the top of the staircase stands Jack, facing the clock just as he had earlier in the movie as he waited for Rose to come belowdecks with him. Jack turns and smiles at Rose, a young girl of 17 again, who smiles back as he helps her up the last few steps. They kiss as the crowd applauds, and it fades to the ending credits. If indeed this scene is depicting Rose's death, then one could assume that she has entered heaven, where Jack was waiting for her. Another argument for this theory is that none of the passengers seen in this scene survived the sinking; all of them perished either onboard the ship as it sank or in the icy water afterwards. On the other hand, the lyrics of the film's theme song "My Heart Will Go On" begins with "Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you", which could indicate that Rose is only asleep and is dreaming of Jack.

In one scene Rose is seen holding and viewing Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in her suite. The painting could never have been on board the ship as it is now in the Museum of Modern Art in the United States.

Cast

Actor	Role
Leonardo DiCaprio	Jack Dawson
Kate Winslet	Rose DeWitt Bukater
Billy Zane	Caledon Hockley
Frances Fisher	Ruth DeWitt Bukater
Kathy Bates	Margaret "Molly" Brown
Eric Braeden	Colonel John Jacob Astor IV
David Warner	Spicer Lovejoy
Martin Jarvis	Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon
Rosalind Ayres	Lady Lucille Duff Gordon
Danny Nucci	Fabrizio De Rossi
Gloria Stuart	Old Rose (Rose Dawson Calvert)
Victor Garber	Thomas Andrews
Bernard Hill	Captain Edward J. Smith
Jonathan Hyde	J. Bruce Ismay
Bernard Fox	Colonel Archibald Gracie
Jason Barry	Tommy Ryan
Ewan Stewart	First Officer William McMaster Murdoch
Jonathan Phillips	Second Officer Charles Lightoller
Ioan Gruffudd	Fifth Officer Harold Lowe
Michael Ensign	Benjamin Guggenheim
James Lancaster	Father Thomas Byles
Rochelle Rose	Noël Leslie, Countess of Rothes
Suzy Amis	Lizzy Calvert
Bill Paxton	Brock Lovett
Anatoly Sagalevitch	Dr. Anatoly Milkailavich
Lewis Abernathy	Lewis Bodine
Elsa Raven	Ida Straus
Lew Palter	Isidor Straus

Reception

Box office

The film received steady attendance after opening in North America on December 19, 1997. By Sunday that same weekend, theatres were beginning to sell out. The film debuted with $28,638,131. By the new year Titanic had increased in popularity and theatres continued selling out; unusually, it took fifteen weeks for its weekly gross to decline 50%, the most for any film in the 1990s. By March 1998 it was the first film to earn more than $1 billion worldwide.

Titanic holds the record for the highest-grossing film of all time. The previous North American record of $460,998,000 was held by Star Wars.

Criticism

Titanic received a great deal of negative advance publicity for its budget overruns and delayed release. When it was released, reviews were favorable. Roger Ebert said "It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding." Some reviewers felt that the story and dialogue were weak while the visuals were spectacular. Jeff Millar of the Houston Chronicle wrote, "When the ship does hit the berg, at the one-hour-and-45-minute point, we are immediately compensated for the padding in writer-director James Cameron's basic narrative — a shipboard romance."

James Berardinelli gave the film four stars out of four, placing it #2 of the year 1997 (behind The Sweet Hereafter). In his review he mentioned:

Cameron's flawless re-creation of the legendary ship has blurred the line between reality and illusion to such a degree that we can't be sure what's real and what isn't. To make this movie, it's as if Cameron built an all-new Titanic, let it sail, then sunk it... Titanic represents Cameron's most accomplished work to date. It's important not to let the running time hold you back -- those three-plus hours pass very quickly. Although this telling of the Titanic story is far from the first, it is the most memorable, and is deserving of Oscar nominations not only in the technical categories, but in the more substantive ones of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

However, the film also received many negative reviews. Kenneth Turan's review in the LA Times was particularly scathing. Dismissing the emotive elements, he says "what really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only isn't it, it isn't even close." Barbara Shulgasser of San Francisco Examiner gave Titanic one star out of four, citing a friend as saying "the number of times in this unbelievably badly written script that the two [lead characters] refer to each other by name was an indication of just how dramatically the script lacked anything more interesting for the actors to say."

Awards

Won

Titanic won Oscars in almost every category it was nominated in (14 nominations and 11 wins). It was the second movie to win that number (the first was Ben-Hur with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King matching the record in 2004). At the time, it was also the only movie in which two people playing the same person (Kate Winslet as Rose and Gloria Stuart as Old Rose) were both nominated for an award (coincidentally, the second film to do so, Iris, also starred Winslet). Cameron's screenplay received no nomination.

This is the second film distributed by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox to win the Academy Award for "Best Picture" in three years. The first was Braveheart (1995).

Academy Awards

Award	Person
Art Direction	Peter Lamont Michael Ford Michael Foster
Cinematography	Russell Carpenter
Costume Design	Deborah Lynn Scott
Best Director	James Cameron
Film Editing	Conrad Buff IV James Cameron Richard A. Harris
Music (Original Dramatic Score)	James Horner
Best Original Song for My Heart Will Go On	James Horner Will Jennings
Best Picture	James Cameron Jon Landau
Best Sound	Gary Rydstrom Tom Johnson Gary Summers Mark Ulano
Sound Effects Editing	Tom Bellfort Christopher Boyes
Visual Effects	Robert Legato Mark A. Lasoff Thomas L. Fisher Michael Kanfer
Nominated:
Best Actress in a Leading Role	Kate Winslet
Best Actress in a Supporting Role	Gloria Stuart
Best Makeup	Tina Earnshaw Greg Cannom Simon Thompson

Soundtrack

Main article: Titanic (soundtrack)

The soundtrack CD for Titanic was composed by James Horner and sold more than twenty million copies, notable because it included only one pop song with lyrics. The soundtrack includes performances from the Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø, and the famous Canadian singer Céline Dion. It became a worldwide success, and led to the release of a second volume that contained a mixture of previously unreleased soundtrack recordings with newly-recorded performances of some of the songs in the film, including one track recorded by Enya's sister, Máire Brennan of the Irish band Clannad. "Hymn to the Sea" featured Bad Haggis's Eric Rigler on the uilleann pipes and whistles.

James Horner wrote the song "My Heart Will Go On" in secret with Will Jennings because Cameron did not want any songs with singing in the film. Dion agreed to record a demo with the persuasion of her husband René Angélil. Horner waited until Cameron was in an appropriate mood before presenting him with the song. After playing it several times, Cameron declared its approval, although worried that he would have been criticized for "going commercial at the end of the movie".

DVD

Titanic was first released to DVD in 1999 in a widescreen-only (non-anamorphic) single disc edition with no special features. Cameron stated at the time that he intended to release a special edition with extra features at a later date. Six years later, on October 25, 2005, a special edition release finally occurred with a 3-DVD set in North America that included an anamorphic widescreen-only presentation of the movie divided onto two of the discs, 45 minutes of deleted scenes, an alternate ending, a faux 1912-style newsreel, a crew tribute/gag reel, and other features. An international two-disc and four-disc edition followed on November 7, 2005.

Deleted scenes

The 2005 Uncut DVD release included about 45 minutes worth of deleted scenes that were cut from the film either for pacing, to shorten the film to a marketable running time, or for reasons James Cameron describes in his commentary as "tonal". Some of the cut sequences are minor additions, while others are major scenes. The public were first made aware of many of these deleted scenes with the publication of Titanic's screenplay in 1998 and a few of them were first shown in a Fox TV special detailing the making of the film, and later Cameron incorporated some of the cut scenes into his Titanic Explorer CD-ROM. Still other scenes involving Jack and Rose passed into near-legend with fans of the romantic subplot of the film wanting to see more of their heroes.

References

• "Top Grossing Films Ever". The Movie Times. Retrieved November 16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

External links

• Titanic official website
• Titanic at IMDb
• Listen 'Titanic'title song