There is nothing "small" about James Cameron's film "Titanic." It chronicles the first and last voyage of one of the largest cruise ships in nautical history. It utilizes a replica of the ocean liner built to 90% scale of the original ship in some scenes. It runs 3 hours and 14 minutes. It cost $260 million to make. It took over three years to complete. It is the product of a big director with a big talent and a big ego to boot. And most of all, it is the story of a disaster so vast that it has held a firm grip on the American imagination for over eighty years.

Bearing all of this in mind, it becomes nearly impossible to NOT be moved and inspired by "Titanic." You may enter the theater brimming with skepticism, and certainly you would have plenty of reasons to justify your feelings. After all, in the film world big budgets are often associated with big bombs. The delays in release suggest a troubled masterpiece that may never reach the levels of perfection which Cameron has set for his work. Most of all, the story looks trite and overdone: forbidden love blossoms, in a predictable clash of youth versus age and poverty versus wealth. Needless to say, age and wealth do not persevere in this movie.

No one perseveres, and thus Cameron has us exactly where he wants us. The scope and sheer majesty of "Titanic" in its greatest moments, along with the immensity of the tragedy which each audience member irrevocably knows must happen, make it a near-perfect melodramatic vehicle. I say "melodrama" because the story of the Titanic could not be told in any other way. To make a possibly unfair comparison to another recently-released historical drama, Spielberg in "Amistad" takes a compelling tale from our nation's history and distorts it into melodrama. Cameron in "Titanic" takes a great tragic tale from our nation's history and justifiably crafts it into melodrama. Melodrama fits not only the extreme tragedy of the Titanic's ultimate fate, but the immensity of the historical era itself, as the wealthy opulently displayed their wealth and the poor suffered hardships that today would be grounds for a multi- million dollar lawsuit.

Telling the story of "Titanic" as unabashed melodrama is perhaps the only option for Cameron, and so he focuses not on finding new and exciting characters and situations in his story, but on milking the existing dramatic situations for every ounce of anguish and emotional turmoil that they're worth. He succeeds brilliantly. The film begins in the present, where Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is an ocean explorer obsessed with finding a rare jewel, the Heart of the Ocean, amidst the wreckage of the sunken Titanic. (Tremendous metafilm irony is generated by mental comparisons between Paxton's character and James Cameron, both of whom have searched for something in the wreckage of Titanic for over three years.) Inside an excavated safe, Lovett discovers a drawing of a beautiful woman wearing the jewel, and is stunned days later when an elderly lady contacts his expedition claiming to know where the jewel is located. Sure enough, the elderly woman is the 101-year-old Rose Dawson (Gloria Stuart), who not only can identify the woman in the picture but can tell her life story, because she is the woman.

As Rose tells her story of Titanic, the film transports its viewers back to 1912, and we hear of Rose's doomed love affair with Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a poor artist from the third-class bunks that sit far below the opulent accommodations of the first-class passengers. Rose (played in the 1912 sequences by Kate Winslet) faces an unwanted marriage to wealthy socialite and foppish prig Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), who seems an abusive husband waiting to happen and treats Rose like a possession. Rose finds freedom of the heart in her love for Jack, and the relationship faces its greatest threat just as the staff of Titanic begin to make their way through the passenger decks, asking all inhabitants to put on their life jackets and the first-class passengers to "dress warmly" and make their way to the top deck of the ship.

If the plot sounds like a glorified episode of "The Love Boat," that's because it is. Ultimately, the love story is but a prelude to the real center of the film, the Titanic's collision with an iceberg and its subsequent sinking over two hours and forty minutes in the freezing cold of a single night in April of 1912. Though there are some great moments in the first two hours of the film, Cameron really earns his salary in his depiction of the Titanic's sinking. He brings all of his talents to bear on this pivotal hour of moviemaking, and the results are breathtaking.

Dialogue, visuals, and editing are fused into a seamless whole. The plots and subplots that have developed throughout the film each pay off in their own way, from the ship's captain who stands at his post until death to the climactic moment where Rose refuses her mother's command to board the life boat and runs off to rescue her true love from the ship's brig. The action leaps from the third-class passengers fighting stewards and guards to escape forced confinement on the lower decks, to the first-class passengers fighting each other for space on a lifeboat, to Rose and Jack fighting through the ship to the upper as the Titanic sinks around them. No detail is missed, no moment wasted. It is one of the tightest and most suspenseful hours of moviemaking in recent memory, and perhaps in all of film history.

The sinking sequence in "Titanic" is also a tribute solely to James Cameron, who not only wrote and directed the movie but shares editing and producing credits as well. In wearing so many production hats, he seems to drive the movie solely through the sheer force of his will. The sinking recalls the most suspenseful and effective moments of his previous action blockbusters, but adds to them a deeper emotional commitment. In addition, "Titanic" features the same ground-breaking special effects as Cameron's previous movies. Digital Domain, his visual effects house, raises the stakes in its rivalry with Lucasfilm's ILM in depicting a flawlessly realistic Titanic throughout the movie. It does exceptional work in the sinking sequence, as the ship believably snaps in two while entirely computer-generated passengers run for higher ground. The visual effects are so remarkable that at times, it becomes impossible to actually believe that Cameron and his crew were not present in 1912, taping every moment of the disaster from the safety of a helicopter.

While Cameron and a host of other talents have crafted a technical masterpiece, it is the performances of the film's actors that give the audience a reason to become involved enough not to notice the film's machinery. In that respect, Leonardo DiCaprio is truly the on-screen champion of "Titanic." His work calls to mind a (much, MUCH) younger Harrison Ford in its effortless confidence, but takes away the slight cockiness that has been a trademark of many Ford characters. It's no exaggeration to say that he holds the film together, as Billy Zane and (to a lesser extent) Kate Winslet chew the scenery to a fine pulp. Winslet is surprisingly unconvincing in spots, clearly trying very hard to simulate the appearance of not trying at all. But in all the right moments, she comes through with enough emotional restraint to bring believability back.

Too bad the same can't be said for Billy Zane, who is just in- Zane as Cal Hockley, smarmily darting all over the emotional map like a 300-pound minx. Think of Jon Lovitz as Master Thespian ("Acting--Brilliant--THANK you!") and you've pretty much got an idea of where Zane goes with his role. It's one of those rare occasions where you want to climb into the screen and shout at an actor, "LESS energy, please!" His every appearance is a distraction, at times forcing me to suppress my giggles at his campy showboating.

But emotionally, the heart of the film lies in the present, with Gloria Stuart doing a remarkable job (certainly deserving of an Oscar nomination) as Rose in 1997. Her work is quiet, understated, and dignified. Each time she appears, the viewer is reminded that he is viewing the film's action through her eyes, and the emotional impact of events is brought home even deeper.

Like Rose in "Titanic," James Cameron has peeled away the layers of time and memory to vividly recreate one of the most powerful historical events of the early twentieth century. It is a massive testimony to his talent that the vastness of his film rarely tips into the realm of wretched excess. The movie "Titanic" could easily have been as great a disaster as the ship itself, but Cameron manages to craft a film that is virtually "unsinkable" in its majesty and impact.