Titanic

Year:  1997

Filming:  Color

Length:  194 minutes

Genre:  Disaster/Drama/Epic/Romance/Tragedy

Maturity:  PG-13 (for language, sexuality, and intense thematic elements)

Main Cast:   Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews), Bernard Hill (Capt. Edward John Smith), Ewan Stuart (First Officer William Murdoch), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown)

Director:  James Cameron

Personal Rating: 2 Stars 

***

    When you find yourself cringing almost every time the main characters make an appearance on screen, it’s a pretty good indication something’s not quite right. Thus is the case with James Cameron’s epic disaster flick, Titanic. While there may be some redeeming aspects in the latter half of the movie, they are incapable of successfully counteracting the cheesy acting, blatant immorality, and disrespect for another time period that is hammered home at every conceivable opportunity.

    Kate Winslet stars as Rose DeWitt Bukater, a wealthy young woman who is engaged to an incorrigibly villainous business tycoon named Caledon Hockley. Among his other manifold virtues, Cal is a narrow-minded chauvinist who treats Rose like an ornament he has purchased. Although it is indicated that they have already been living together as “husband and wife”, she is obviously fed up with him by the time she gets on board the doomed RMS Titanic and makes it her priority to throw herself overboard (as if she just can’t wait for the inevitable!).

    But before she can take the plunge, a devil-may-care, man-of-the-streets named Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, manages to exert his boyish charm and pull her back from the brink. The next day, when Rose meets him on deck to thank him, it is revealed that he is a starving artist, and what little income he has managed to earn mainly derives from drawing naked girls in Paris and beyond. And amazingly for her sophisticated upbringing, Rose doesn’t seem the least bit disturbed by this little tid-bit. In fact, later on at a first class dinner he is invited to as a guest for saving her from “falling” overboard, she gushes about his talent to the assembly!

    Sensing her definite lack of chemistry with straight-laced Cal, Jack invites her to a third class hoe-down in steerage, where Rose drinks, smokes, stands on her tip-toes as a challenge to the “big men”, and dances a few Irish jigs with her naked-picture-doodler. Needless to say, when Cal gets wind of this, he takes it to heart. And the result is smashed up china and a sobbing Rose whose mother insists she submit herself to Cal’s tyranny in order to pay off her late father’s debts.

    But Jack is determined to “save” Rose and convinces her to declare her independence and go on a wild fling with him on the ship. This includes standing together on the guard rails of Titanic with arms to outstretched to create the illusion of flying (innocent enough for starters) and later posing for a naked picture (I can understand being a patron of the arts, but…..umm…..) with nothing but Cal’s engagement necklace, “The Heart of the Ocean”, around her neck. They proceed to a car parked on deck (no fear of them driving off with it, anyway; no keys!) and go “all out” in the back seat. Things don’t improve.

    By this time, what we’ve all been waiting for finally occurs, and Titanic meets her Waterloo in the form of a humungous iceberg. The problems that develop as a result of this don’t stop Cal from framing Jack for stealing Rose’s necklace and giving her a good slap across the face. (Frankly, I’m on his side for once!) As it becomes increasingly apparent that the ship is sinking, Rose refuses to get into a lifeboat and goes in search of Jack in the bowels of the ship where he has been locked up by the ever-forgiving Cal.

    The next sizable portion of the plot involves the three main characters chasing each other around the ship and surviving things normal people probably wouldn’t. The climax of this hide-and-go-seek game occurs when Cal tries to convince Rose to take her seat in a lifeboat, promising if he will get Jack off the ship safely. For a moment she believes him, but then thinks again (I don’t know why!) and leaps back into the ship through the Grand Stateroom window as her boat is being lowered. The result is a major smooch sequence with Jack, and then the appearance a very disgruntled Cal, shooting at them with his pistol!

    Needless to say, they manage to evade him, and, in keeping with his character, he rigs a way to get a seat in a lifeboat by claiming he has a child. (Couldn’t the officers deduct that he wasn’t really the fatherly type?) Down under, Rose and Jack are still running around, sometimes submerged in saltwater, and are only able to clamber up on deck as Titanic is tilting at an ominous slant and about to go under for good. By hook or by crook, both the main characters manage to survive the impact of the ship sinking beneath the waves by clinging onto the railing where they first met.   

    Plunged into the icy waters, Jack helps Rose to climb on top of a piece of floating debris that can hold only one person. He, meanwhile, remains submerged in the water and succumbs to hypothermia as a result. Before he dies, he makes the despairing Rose promise that she will survive no matter what, and go on to have a life and a family and die an old lady “warm in her bed.” When a lifeboat finally does show up looking for survivors, she takes a whistle from a floating corpse and blows it with all her might, enabling her to be found and rescued.

    And she does fulfill her promise to the late doodler, living to a ripe old age and coming back to claim the naked picture of herself when Titanic is finally relocated at the bottom of the sea and its treasures brought forth. This should be creepy for those involved, but the treasure-hunters’ main concern involves the whereabouts of her necklace, “The Heart of the Ocean.” As it turns out, she still has it, but promptly dumps it overboard to prevent it from being used for publicity reasons. Soon after, she passes away peacefully in her sleep and is greeted by Jack and all those who perished in the shipwreck in an epic reunion in a glorified Grand Stateroom. It is devoutly to be hoped that an art class isn’t on the list of party activities.

    For having a plotline so obsessed with the issue of “class”, Titanic notably lacks it. While I might say it is an interesting perspective to portray Titanic as symbolic of the “evils of the age” and make her sinking something of a necessity to usher in a better world with less pride and prejudice, the scenes range from melodramatic hyperbole to sensationalist stunts, with vulgar language and actions thrown in as some sort of “spice” that makes one gag. Most of the characters come off as being flat and two-dimensional, and their interactions with one another are equally prefabricated, thanks in great part to the modern acting styles and attitudes depicted.

    Cal is too stereotypically “bad” to be taken seriously. His every move can be predicted from beginning to end, expect perhaps the “Keystone Cops” chase scene he sets into motion by taking a few pot shots at the lovers with his pistol. That was simply too outlandish to be foreseen. On the other hand, Jack is not “good” enough to be a satisfying hero for me. Can Rose (or anyone) honestly believe he’s a respecter of the rights and dignities of women? He draws naked girls for a living, for crying out loud, and I don’t care if they did give him permission! The point is he is instrumental in debasing the female body as a source of lust for monetary gain. Plus, he seems to have no qualms about having sex with a girl he just met a few days ago in someone else’s car parked on the deck of a ship. Weird.

    The fact that Rose doesn’t find any of this the least bit sketchy just sets the stage for her own appalling impropriety. She seems to associate “freedom” with being able to drink, smoke, strip down to be drawn naked, and have sex with a virtual stranger in awkward locations. For all her “independent womanhood” and complaints about feeling enslaved, she certainly is selling herself cheap and diminishing any feelings of sympathy I had for her plight.

    I will grudgingly admit there are a few clear spots in the murky water. As some have said, while it may be the lousiest romance on the block, Titanic manages to be a decent epic in some respect. When the ship actually begins to sink, and the hopeless love triangle is not the main focus, the cinematic special effects have a frightening realism about them. We also get to see moments of human tenderness and endurance in the midst of tragedy.

     A priest comforts his flock by holding their hands and preaching a sermon from Revelation about the New Heaven and New Earth. An Irish mother tells a fairy tale to her children to quiet them, even as the water seeps below deck. An elderly couple lay next to each other in bed, whispering loving words, waiting for the end to come. Thomas Andrews, the builder of the ship, remains below deck in a state of disillusionment and stops the grand clock in the stateroom. The famous orchestra remains on deck and plays “Nearer My God to Thee” in the midst of the chaos. Captain Smith, distraught by his inability to save his passengers from their fate, retreats to his cabin where remains until the glass smashes from the pressure of the water and he goes down with his ship.

    I thought it was a nice touch that Rose chose to identify herself as “Rose Dawson” to demonstrate the way he had changed her life by ostensibly “rescuing” her from a confining future and giving her a chance to live a full life. This element of gaining a second chance is further highlighted by the close-up on the Statue of Liberty as her ship anchors in New York and the pictures that are shown lined up on her end-table in her elderly years. I was also relieved that the ending made some allusion to the afterlife, even if it was a bit corny and theologically simplistic, since it did succeed in giving the tragedy something of a hopeful finale.

    The music score is, for the most part, top-notch, especially the tracks “Hymn to the Sea” with it’s ethereal Celtic overtones, “Southampton”, booming with the grandeur of the great ship, “Titanic Set”, a series of Irish reels from Gaelic Storm, and “Rose” which introduces the love theme for the first time. Of course, this theme will be expanded and developed in the theme song, “My Heart Will Go On”, which I find touching if a bit vague in its meaning. With its connections to New York, the sea, and the afterlife, the film score tends to remind me quite a bit of my late grandmother.

    That having been said, much of the real-life heroics of the sinking of RMS Titanic are skipped over or minimalized in favor of creating a sense of purposelessness and taking a jab at “the old ways”. The stiff-upper-lip courage of the British officers on the ship is recast as nothing more than buffoonish pride. The English passengers in steerage are totally unrepresented, even though they formed the largest percentage below decks.    Instead, the Irish steerage passengers and English officers are pitted against each other to emphasize a more “simply understood” Anglo-Irish conflict.

    First Officer Murdoch, a real-life hero of the disaster, is shown shooting several rioting Irishmen before shooting himself out of guilt (which is complete fiction, so much so that James Cameron had to apologize to Murdoch’s living relations). If they wanted to add this little subplot for kicks, I don’t understand why they didn’t just create a fictional character instead of mangling the story of a real one.

     The order “women and children first” is made to look like a ridiculous vestige of chauvinism. The gentleman who goes down dressed in him best sipping a brandy is shown in wide-eyed panic at the end, as if his cool veneer was all just a game he played to look impressive. Even the “unsinkable” Molly Brown is deprived of her moment of gallantry, when she commandeered her life-boat and returned to pick up survivors. And it is worthy to note that while Jack may sacrifice his life for Rose in an admittedly heart-wrenching scene, we don’t see people given their lives for strangers in a more supernatural outpouring of love.

    But the fact is that noblesse oblige was made manifest repeatedly on board the sinking vessel, and it was authentic, not just a game to look important in front of others. Read real history, and you’ll soon see that it very much a part of what it meant to be considered a “gentleman.” It meant education and good-breeding, certainly, but it also meant something more. It symbolized the duty to be leaders and protectors, the stuff of which heroes are made. It was the Christian concept that the strong should defend the weak.

    The class system was perverse on any number of levels, and inequality was rampant. Women were often degraded to an almost sub-human level by men, and the working class was viewed with snobbish contempt by their “betters”. But the concept that men should defend women and leaders should lay down their lives for their subordinates and that death should be faced with grace and dignity is timeless. This is true even if Hollywood prefers a hedonistic, libertarian, populist worldview.

      Titanic has it’s moments of triumph amidst general movie mayhem, but this is the least the producers could do to save their romantic tragedy from going down with the ship. It is highly unlikely I’d care to watch it over again. To reiterate what I said in my review of The Last of the Mohicans, shallowness and cynicism pulled the plug on the bulwark of this film’s plot, and a good portion of it deserves to be locked in a vault at the bottom of the ocean, along with Rose’s birthday suit picture.  

Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), surviving things normal people wouldn't!