Titanic

The year is 1996, and a treasure hunter and his team explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic in their submersible. A safe is brought to the surface and is opened. It contains, not the fabled treasure the adventurers had hoped for, but only papers. One of them is a nude pencil portrait dated April 14, 1912, and signed "JD". It shows a beautiful young woman reclining nude with casual modesty on a couch. On a necklace around her is the treasure they seek: The Heart of the Ocean.

Rose DeWitt Bukater, an ancient but still lively woman of 101 years (partially based upon the American artist Beatrice Wood), watches a CNN report of the treasure hunt and sees the nude portrait. She phones the treasure hunter Brock Lovett and informs him that she knows about the diamond, the Heart of the Ocean, and also the identity of the beautiful young woman in the portrait: "Oh, yes. The woman in the picture is me." Rose, accompanied by her granddaughter Lizzy Calvert, flies out to the recovery site and proceeds to tell the treasure hunters of her experiences on the Titanic.

Rose, just 17 years old in April of 1912, boards the ship with the upper-class passengers and her mother, society matron Ruth DeWitt Bukater, and her fiance, industrialist Caledon Hockley. Rose clearly does not feel very much for Caledon, but her mother pushes for the marriage for financial security, to maintain their current lavish lifestyle and bolster the social cachet among the Philadelphia elite. Meanwhile, a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson wins third-class tickets to the ship in a poker game.

Rose posing for Jack as he draws a picture of her. She wears only the necklace containing the Heart of the Ocean.Rose is so unhappy about her forced engagement as well as her endlessly shallow life, that she attempts to kill herself by jumping off the stern of the ship. Jack sees her and intervenes to prevent her suicide. The ship's crew find the two sprawled over the deck. At first they think this is a rape, but Rose explains to them that it was an accident. Caledon comes and thanks Jack by reluctantly inviting Jack to dine with their party the following evening in the first-class dining saloon. In the meantime, Rose and Jack soon strike up a tentative friendship as he shares tales of his adventures in traveling and she expresses her own hopes, and he shows her his sketchbook of artwork. Their bond deepens when they later ditch the first-class formal dinner party for a much livelier gathering below decks in third-class.

Jack is clearly falling in love with Rose, but Rose is inclined to ignore their growing affection because of her engagement and their social standings. But eventually she decides to throw caution in the wind and offers her heart to Jack. Rose asks Jack to sketch her wearing nothing but the Heart of the Ocean diamond, the same portrait the treasure hunters will find 84 years later. They later consummate their relationship in the backseat of a car in one of the ship's cargo holds, after being pursued there by Spicer Lovejoy, Caledon's bodyguard.

In the meantime, Captain Edward J. Smith and his crew have been seemingly ignoring many warnings about upcoming ice fields in the ship's path, and the Titanic maintains the high speed suggested by White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay even as the ship heads into the night. On the night of April 14, 1912, the two lookouts see an iceberg directly in the Titanic's path. Despite the many efforts of the crew and engineers, the ship strikes the massive ice berg. Water begins to flood the lower compartments past their "unsinkable" capacity and causes the ship to begin to sink.

Caledon discovers the relationship between Jack and Rose and gets even by framing Jack for stealing his diamond. Caledon then orders Jack to be handcuffed and trapped in a room. Even though she has a chance to escape the sinking ship early on with her mother, Rose runs away from Caledon — and her chance of getting into a lifeboat — to find Jack. She frees Jack and they try desperately to make their way back above decks to escape the rapidly sinking ship. While making their way to the boat deck, they encounter locked gates that are used to keep the third-class passengers from reaching the upper decks to safety. They manage to break through a gate and manage to get up to the deck in time for them to have a chance to make it into one of the last lifeboats.

However, the ship's officers aren't letting any men on the lifeboats, and Rose refuses to get into a lifeboat without Jack. Jack and Caledon, who has been spending all night trying to find Rose and get into a lifeboat, temporarily team up to convince Rose to get into the lifeboat, which she does. While they were trying to convince her, Caledon gave his coat to Rose to keep her warm, forgetting that he had put the Heart of the Ocean in the pocket. When the lifeboat starts to lower away from the ship, Rose realizes that she can't separate herself from Jack, and she jumps back on the ship, and she and Jack reunite on the Grand Staircase, with Caledon and Lovejoy witnessing all of this. Infuriated beyond belief, Caledon takes Lovejoy's handgun and chases Jack and Rose down the staircase, shooting at them the entire time. Caledon runs out of ammunition when Jack and Rose reach the Dining Room, which is quickly flooding. He chooses not to continue pursuing them when he notices the water level. Then he starts to laugh. Lovejoy, who was following behind Caledon, asks "What could possibly be funny?" Caledon says, "I put the diamond in the coat-And I put the coat on her!" Jack and Rose try to make their way to the boat deck again, during which they unsuccessfully attempt to rescue a child in a flooding hallway, and they nearly drown as well behind a locked gate.

Meanwhile, Caledon has bribed his way into the last lifeboat, with Jack's friends, Tommy Ryan and Fabrizio De Rossi, trying to get into the boat themselves. First officer William McMaster Murdoch, the officer in charge of launching the boat, threatens to shoot any man who tries to get into the boat, allowing only women and children into the boat. He rejects Caledon's bribe. The crowd pushes Tommy toward the boat and he gets shot by Murdoch. When Murdoch realizes that he just killed an innocent man, he looks around in shock before commiting suicide by shooting himself in the head. Caledon gets into the lifeboat by pretending to look after an abandoned child. The water reaches the boat deck, and the lifeboat floats off the deck. Fabrizio gets washed into the water and gets killed when the ship's foreward funnel topples over.

Jack and Rose finally make their way to the top deck, but Jack sees that the lifeboats are gone and they, along with 1,500 terrified pasengers and crew, have no choice but to head aft and stay on the ship for as long as possible before the Titanic sinks completely into the water. When they make it to the back of the stern, the deck is becoming harder to walk on because of the tilt of the ship. People begin to jump overboard, trying to swim to the lifeboats, but most of them don't make it and end up dying in the freezing cold water. Eventually, the ship's tilt is so steep that anybody not holding onto anything (deck railing, benches, lifeboat davits, etc.) slides down the deck into the water. The stern of the ship rises higher and higher until its weight causes the ship to break in two. The two sections are still attached at the keel, however, and the bow, which by now is completely flooded, goes under and pulls the stern upright so it is at a 90 degree angle. Jack and Rose have made it to the very aft deck railing, at the "top" of the stern and ready themselves for the final plunge. Eventually, the ship begins its final descent and everyone, including Jack and Rose, are washed into the cold, icy waters of the North Atlantic at 2:20 AM on April 15.

Rose and Jack stick together and wait with the hundreds of other passengers thrashing helplessly in the water, shouting desperately for those in the lifeboats to row back to rescue them. By the time one of the officers decides to row back and help those in need, almost all of the passengers have died of hypothermia in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. Rose is heartbroken to realize that Jack has succumbed, as well. She bids him goodbye, then manages to get the lifeboat's attention to come back and rescue her. The survivors in the lifeboats wait for hours until the RMS Carpathia, the closest ship to answer and heed the Titanic's radio distress signals, arrives to save them. Upon arrival at New York City, Rose discovers that she still has the Heart of the Ocean tucked into the pocket of Caledon's coat.

As an old woman in 1996, Rose now goes onto the deck of the Keldysh (The salvage ship) and throws the Heart of the Ocean into the ocean where Jack died.

Back in Rose's room, the viewers sees pictures of her life's achievements, including a photograph of her riding a horse at the Santa Monica Pier, just as she and Jack had planned to do together. There is also a roller coaster in the background of this picture, another reference to the plans that she and Jack made. (To view some of these photos, go to http://www.rosedawson.com) Rose lies in a bed nearby, a scene where some fans have debated whether she is asleep or had died.

A Promise Kept?

One of the biggest controversies in the film questions whether old Rose died or was dreaming at the end of the film. A possible indication that she died is given by the chapter title in the DVD "A Promise Kept". While Rose and Jack were floating in the freezing water, before Jack died he made her promise that she wouldn't die in the water:

"Listen, Rose. You're gonna get outta here. You're gonna go on. And you're gonna make lots of babies, and your gonna watch them grow. You're gonna die an old, old lady, warm in her bed. Not here. Not this night. Not like this. Do you understand me?....You -- You must do me this honor. You must promise me. That you'll survive. That you won't give up, no matter what happens. No matter how hopeless. Promise me now, Rose. And never let go of that promise."

However, In reality, there is no publicly solidified answer. Cameron is quoted in his commentary toward the end of the film refusing to give away the ending as a way of keeping the film open-ended and exciting for the viewer:

"Now, of course, the big ambiguity here is, "Is she alive, and dreaming?", or "Is she dead, and on her way to Titanic heaven, here?" And of course, I'll never tell. I mean I know what we intended at the time. But that doesn't mean I have to go blurting it out. So, I know you've gone and bought this, you know, expensive special edition DVD, and you were, you know, hoping for the answer. But, the answer is, has to be something that you supply personally, individually." Underwater, the Titanic looms out of the darkness and everything turns new again. A steward opens the doors from the promenade deck to the Grand Staircase, where all those who had died on the ship smile in greeting. At the top of the staircase stands Jack, facing the clock just as he had earlier in the movie. Jack turns and smiles at Rose, a young girl of 17 again, smiling back as he helps her up the last few steps. They kiss as the crowd applause, and it fades to the ending credits. If indeed this scene is depicting Rose's death, it is assumable that she had entered heaven, where Jack has been waiting for her for 84 years. Another argument for this theory is that none of the passengers that are seen in this scene survived the sinking; all of them, including Jack, perished either on board the ship as it sank or in the icy water afterwards. On the other hand, the lyrics of the film's theme song, "My Heart Will Go On" sung by Celine Dion, begins with, "Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you," which could indicate that Rose is only asleep and is dreaming of Jack.