. It features Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater, two members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the ship. The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some supporting characters (such as members of the ship's crew) are based on real historical figures. Gloria Stuart plays the elderly Rose, who narrates the film in a modern day framing device.
Production of the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the real wreck of the RMS Titanic. He envisioned the love story as a means to engage the audience with the real-life tragedy. Shooting took place at the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh for the modern scenes, and a reconstruction of the ship was built at Playas de Rosarito. Cameron also used scale models and computer-generated imagery to recreate the sinking of the ship. Titanic became the most expensive film yet made in inflation unadjusted dollars, costing approximately US$200 million with funding from Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox.
Originally slated to be released on July 2, 1997, post-production delays pushed back the film's release date to December 19, 1997. After word broke out that Titanic's release date was pushed back, the press believed that Titanic would fail and cause the downfall of Fox and Paramount. Despite low expectations, the film was both a critical and commercial success, tying with All About Eve for the most Academy Award nominations, at 14. The film won 11, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, and became the highest-grossing film of all time, with a total worldwide gross of approximately $1.8 billion (it is the sixth-highest grossing in North America once adjusted for inflation).
In 1996, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his team explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic, searching for a necklace set with a valuable blue diamond called the Heart of the Ocean. They discover a drawing of a young woman reclining nude, wearing the Heart of the Ocean, dated the day the Titanic sank. News of this drawing on television attracts the interest of the woman in question, Rose Dawson Calvert, now nearly 101, who informs Lovett that she is the nude woman in the drawing. She and her granddaughter Lizzy visit Lovett on his ship, and she recalls her memories as 17-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater aboard the Titanic to the somewhat skeptical team.
In 1912, young Rose boards the departing ship in Southampton England with the upper-class passengers, her mother, Ruth DeWitt Bukater, and her fiancé, Caledon Hockley. Also on board is Margaret "Molly" Brown, who meets Rose at a dinner. Distraught and frustrated with her engagement to Cal and her controlled life, Rose attempts to commit suicide by jumping from the stern, but a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson, who had won his ticket on the ship from a poker game, intervenes. Initially Cal, his friends and the sailors, overhearing Rose's screams, believe the penniless Jack attempted to rape her. She explains Jack saved her life, covering up her suicide attempt by explaining she slipped after trying to see the propellers. Jack corroborates her white lie to everyone present, but privately, Hockley's manservant, former police officer Spicer Lovejoy, expresses to Jack his skepticism. Jack and Rose strike up a tentative friendship as she thanks him for his corroboration, and he shares stories of his adventures traveling and sketching; their bond deepens when they leave a first-class formal dinner for a much livelier gathering in third-class.
Cal is informed of her partying in the steerage and forbids Rose to meet Jack again. Rose's mother also commands her to give up Jack and save her engagement to Cal in order to ensure their financial welfare. Eventually, Jack confronts Rose alone, but she is inclined to ignore their growing affection because of her engagement and responsibilities. However, after witnessing a woman encouraging her seven-year-old daughter to behave like a "proper lady" at tea, Rose later changes her mind and decides to offer her heart to Jack in a forbidden romance. As a sign of her affection, she asks him to sketch her naked wearing only the Heart of the Ocean, which she had previously been offered as an engagement present by Cal. Afterwards, the two run away from Lovejoy, and they go below decks to the ship's cargo hold. They enter William Carter's Renault traveling car and have sex, before escaping up to the ship's forward well deck. They escape just in time, before two ship's hands, per Cal's orders come and search for them in the cargo hold. Rose decides that when they arrive at New York, she will leave the ship with Jack. They then witness the ship's collision with an iceberg, which critically damages it. Meanwhile, Cal discovers Rose's nude drawing and her taunting note in his safe. He plots revenge, deciding to frame Jack for stealing the Heart of the Ocean, and bribes the master-at-arms to go along with the plan and handcuff Jack in his office. Although Rose is at first indecisive, she later runs away from Cal, risking her chances of getting on a lifeboat with her mother, in order to find and rescue Jack, since the ship has begun sinking and the master-at-arms has no intention of going back to his office to free Jack.
Published: June 10, 2008
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