'Titanic' tugs at emotions

(CNN) -- I'll be perfectly honest.  Going in, the main reason 
I was happy to finally be seeing "Titanic," director James 
Cameron's much-ballyhooed $200 million epic, was because it 
meant that I wouldn't have to watch that damn trailer 
anymore.  When two studios get together and make a movie that 
costs more than their own privately funded South American 
guerrilla war, you have to figure they're going to make dead 
certain that the world feels it has to attend when 
they're done blowing all that dough.  So, obviously, the 
first question that needs to be answered is, is the end 
result really worth all that money?
[:phon arpa off]
The answer is a resounding "yes," but with philosophical 
qualifiers.  The money, as they say, is on the screen, but, 
happily, there's a lot more to it than that.  Quite 
surprisingly, when you consider that he's usually more 
concerned with The Terminator theatrically pulling drunken 
bikers' arms out of their sockets, Cameron has devised a 
tender love story between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio 
that serves as the main focus of "Titanic's" storyline, and 
it works beautifully.

I've been saying since the day that I heard Cameron was going 
to film the story that it was doomed to failure because the 
only thing anybody is interested in concerning the Titanic is 
that it took a dive.  Incredibly, though, I got so caught up 
in his star-crossed lovers while watching the movie, I was 
actually surprised when that iceberg approached out of the 
darkness.  This is the equivalent of watching "Star Wars" and 
getting immersed in the Han Solo/Princess Leia story while 
forgetting all about the Death Star.

The film opens with a brief prologue in which Bill Paxton, as 
a modern-day treasure hunter, explores the wreckage of the 
real-life Titanic far beneath the Atlantic Ocean.  Cameron 
actually took his camera 2 1/2 miles down to see the real 
thing, and the results are hauntingly impressive, with 
decaying railings and smashed bedframes reminding us that 
this was an actual tragedy, not a figment of some 
screenwriter's imagination.  Paxton's character is looking 
for a huge diamond that was supposed to have been stored 
onboard the ship when it went down.  His exploits are 
reported on television, and this brings him into contact with 
a 100-year-old woman (nicely played by 87-year-old 
whippersnapper Gloria Stuart) who claims to have been on the 
ship and in possession of the diamond at the time of the 
disaster.

As Stuart tells her story, a shot of the rotting wreckage 
morphs back in time to 1912 and the movie-proper begins.  
Rose is now a beautiful 17-year-old played by Kate Winslet, 
who isn't 17 but has the beautiful part down cold.  She's 
boarding the ship for its maiden (and, of course, only) 
voyage with her super-wealthy, uber-snooty fianc&#233;e, Cal 
Hockley.  Hockley is played by Billy Zane, and he's easily 
the weak link in the film.  Cal is the only character that's 
poorly written, and Zane telegraphs his villainous line 
readings (and wiggles his eyebrows) like he's about to tie 
Tom Mix's girlfriend to the railroad tracks.  
