December 19, 1997 | The big iceberg doesn't make its first appearance until 97 minutes or so into James Cameron's three-hour-plus Titanic. And when it finally does brush against the "unsinkable" luxury liner, the impact really doesn't seem all that devastating at first. More like a nick, or a nasty scrape. But our plucky hero, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, recognizes the severity of the situation right away. Gazing in the general direction of the collision between man-made folly and Mother Nature, he nods ever so slightly, then solemnly remarks: "This is bad."

At which point, you and other members of the audience may suffer a sudden attack of the giggles.

Unfortunately, this is neither the first nor the last time you'll be tempted to laugh during Cameron's $200-million production. Titanic obviously is intended as the sort of old-fashioned, larger-than-life, shoot-the-works romantic epic that David Lean and other masters used to make. (Cameron has specifically cited Lean's Doctor Zhivago as an inspiration.) To its credit, the movie offers impressively lavish production values, a satisfying taste of period flavor and -- once the great ship starts taking in water -- some genuinely awesome displays of terror, destruction and special-effects wizardry. What the movie doesn't offer, however, is a compelling story. Without that, it remains little more than The Poseidon Adventure writ large, though without the saving grace of comic relief from Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters.
         
Instead of those colorful old pros, we get DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, a penniless artist who wins a third-class ticket aboard the Titanic in a card game, and Kate Winslet (Sense and Sensibility) as Rose DeWitt Bukater, a first-class passenger who's unhappily engaged to a caddish tycoon, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). Ruth (Frances Fisher), Rose's snobbish mother, is desperately eager for her daughter to replenish the family's diminished fortunes through a marriage of convenience. But Rose is so depressed by the prospect of being the wife of a bullying lout that she very nearly commits suicide by jumping off the ship. Naturally, Jack stops her, and, just as naturally, they fall in love. This greatly distresses Rose, and seriously enrages Cal. Indeed, Cal is so upset about losing Rose that, even as the Titanic begins to sink, he chases after the young lovers with a pistol in his hand and blood in his eye.

As Cal, Zane give a shamelessly hammy performance worthy of a silent-movie cliffhanger. (Presumably, if he had a mustache, he would twirl it.) But, then again, maybe Zane (and his indulgent director) felt the need to compensate for the blandness at the heart of the film.  The star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose is the chief focus of Titanic -- everything else, including the hundreds of extras and supporting players who don't make it onto the lifeboats, is just so much window dressing.  Trouble is, DiCaprio and Winslet  simply aren't substantial enough to make their grand romantic gestures seem like anything but melodramatic posturing. It doesn't help much that Winslet, cast as a pampered high-society beauty, appears far more worldly and mature than DiCaprio, who's supposed to be a well-traveled adventurer. And it doesn't help at all that Cameron, who directed Titanic from his own screenplay, gives his actors great wads of cliche-heavy dialogue that falls from their mouths and onto the floor with a singular lack of grace.

If you can look beyond what Cameron insists on placing in the foreground of his story, you can see flashes of the great movie that might have been. Titanic vividly evokes the spirit of an age when something as audacious as an immense luxury liner would seem the last word in human accomplishment. The year is 1912, and the Titanic, the crown jewel of the highly competitive White Star Line, is viewed with something very close to reverence by designers, passengers and crew members alike.  Why aren't there enough lifeboats on board? Simple: Too many lifeboats on deck would detract from the great ship's aesthetic splendor.  And besides, nothing this enormous, this state-of-the art magnificent, would ever sink. Right?

Cameron has framed his period drama with modern-day scenes involving a salvage crew led by Bill Paxton. (He's after a legendary jewel hidden somewhere in the long-submerged wreckage.) The conceit may sound hokey, but it turns out to be a inspired embellishment, since it enables Cameron to show early on, through the computer-generated graphics of Paxton's associates, just what happened to the Titanic during the early hours of April 15, 1912. Much later, that high-tech image comes back to haunt the audience, as the disaster slowly unfolds in what feels like real time. Since we already know exactly what occurred -- why the ship began to tilt forward into the icy water, then broke in two -- there is a grippingly relentless logic to the dreadful chaos that ensues.

The last hour of Titanic is good enough, and often terrifying enough, to transcend almost everything that is wrong with the film. Even though the melodramatic nonsense periodically intrudes, it never diminishes the enormity of a disaster that has become one of this century's most enduringly fascinating legends. If Cameron would have paid more attention to the wanton hubris that caused this tragedy to occur, Titanic could have been a truly extraordinary spectacle. And if the director of Aliens and the Terminator films had created a love story worthy of being told against this backdrop, Titanic might have been a masterpiece. But he didn't, so it isn't.