CERITA PERCINTAAN

TITANIC

It is essentially a love story and yet who is going to take the poor-kid-from-steerage-meets-rich-girl-from-A-deck seriously? It is such a pop up cliche, especially when the toffs are twits and the ordinary folk so nice.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is an upper-class American teenager, with an English accent and a coltish spirit, who has been talked by her mother into marriage to a US bussiness shark, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). They are travelling back from Europe to the States to arrange the wedding. Cal is an arrogant racist bully who expects his wife to behave like a tame parakeet. Rose won't do that and is wild with the injustice of her destiny, ready to fling herself over the rail in depair when Jack  Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) stops her with a sensible line of chat on the subject of life's grand adventure.

Jack is a young man Hemingway might have emulated in his formative years, penniless and optimisti, from a small  town where the principles of common decency are ingested with mother's milk and adversity considered as challenging as luck. He's a budding artist of the sidewalk portrait variety, who is only on The Titanc because he won a ticket in a poker game. He's country boy who has learnt self-reliance and gained confidence by stretching ambition beyond the horizon. He doesn't know what he wants to be. He know where he wants to go.

The film is dressed for a ball. The supporting actors tend toward stereotype and cannot compete with Jack and Rose's genuine passion for each other. The post iceburg death throes are long drawn out, like the worst best nightmares. What raises Cameron's creation above costumed action spectacle is the quality of the writing and the chemistry of its juve leads. Winslet has an ability to perform with emotional white heat. She has an intellegence and sex appeal that makes no demands on sentimentality. DiCaprio brings to Jack a captivating attractiveness that is neither faked, nor forced. Together, they are worth half the cost of the movie, not in fees, but in commitment.