Shame, shame, shame on you, James Cameron

Rating: 3/10 (21 July 2007)

I will not accuse this of being the most over-rated film I've yet seen, because, first, it has its share of redeeming qualities, and second, that honor has to go to The Illusionist (which in many ways was actually a lame attempt to ape the Titanic formula, but I've already blasted that one into the ground). Neither can I fault it for grossing so much: a film that shamelessly panders to over-emoted teenage girls is bound to produce a good showing at the box-office. But the fact that a sloppy period piece that insults the period it pays tribute to could earn such lavish sycophantic adulation from nearly all reviewers (especially celebrity film writers) is just more evidence that America's thought-élitejournalists, politicians, and academics alikehave got to be the most degenerate, gullible, and monolithic in the Western world.
There are two intertwined reasons why Titanic is on balance worth seeing: the historical setting and the special effects. Enough has been written on the latter, and on the former, as well, but as an Atlantic historian I cannot express enough love for anything so exquisitely and meticulously designed floating on the ocean of my heritage, just around the time my family was making its way over from Europe. Older Rose's remark that, "It was the ship of dreams. And it was. It really was," ring so true. I beseech my readers: regard the volume of immigrant ship traffic in the era, admire the interior of the ship and the costumes of the passengers and contrast them to the most luxurious modern cruise liners, in an era where ships are often not a necessity, and consider how much the Western world lost in less than a century. (This sort of aesthetic history lesson is the same reason I love Chariots of Fire.)
Regard, admire, compare and consider... if, that is, you can get past a script that hangs together like a soggy potato chip and pays not the least attention to real historical personages.
Our two protagonists are at best naïvely laughable and at worst totally unsympathetic, their antagonists little more than cartoon characters. That the former speak like modern teenagers is quite appropriate, because they clearly ARE modern teenagers pitted against the backward old fogies of the era. Jack is a romanticized Bohemian bum with little that could possibly seduce a beautiful young Anglo-American socialite away from her privileged life. Rose wants us to believeand she convinces Jack, somehowthat deep down she's some sort of fiery rebel, yet what I saw was a girl alternating between doing the bidding of her wealthy, domineering cardboard-cutout fiancé Cal and the bidding of her impoverished, sappy, cardboard-looking loverboy Jack. There's so much ham and cheese at work you'll want to take a fork and start eating.
And there is something utterly vile about their story, which, again, is clearly aimed at adolescent females, and that fact makes Titanic's moral tone all the more disturbing. This is a film with an agenda: all the authority figures are stupid murderous bigots, the 17-year-old heroine is glorified for rebelling against her mother and fornicating with a wild rover, and don't forget that wicked cabin church excluding third-class passengers from attending the Sunday service on that fateful last day of Titanic's voyage.
In reality, the whole ship was completely segregated. I am told church services were excepted, though I have my doubts, but not because of snobbery on anyone's part. Third-class passengers were largely immigrants without medical certificates and in that era of the great migrations, were required to register at Ellis Island; hence U.S. law required complete segregation on all inbound European ships. And, on these grounds, it scarcely needs saying, such a liaison between Jack and Rose, far from stupid and implausible, was quite impossible.
Finally, despite the segregation, Doug Phillips has pointed out, "there is no credible evidence that first-class passengers were given priority seating rights. To the contrary, there are numerous accounts of first-class passengers giving up their seats and assisting third-class passengers into lifeboats."
There are plenty of other factual gaffes, many of them less severe (such as the bad British accents), but by far the most appalling is the libelous depiction of the ship's crew. There is no evidence that William Murdoch accepted bribes from a cowardly aristocrat, nor that he shot two men, nor that he subsequently committed suicide, and so far as I know, such a portrayal was a completely ad hoc invention on the writers' part. (James Cameron's apology to the Murdoch family was too little, too late.) The surviving passengers testified that the crew performed their duties sacrificially and heroically that evening. That is the biggest sin of this film: the real heroes of the Titanic tragedy (with the exception of Thomas Andrews) are washed over or even villanized in favor of capricious brats, only one of whom gets his comeuppance.
Even so, towards the ship's final gasp of life, we do get a good sense of the imminent terror not only in Jack and Rose, but in all 1,500 souls who perished that evening. The worst moment had to be the power outage: it's those last, frightening milestones on the road to destruction that remind you where you are headed irreversibly, and the scene of the actual sinking captures this perfectly. The true story of the RMS Titanic, from its building to its sinking, and even its aftermath as grown Belfast men whose labor on that ship had been the pride and joy of their city wept in the streets at the news of her demise, is beautifully tragic and inspirational. Would that this film had captured more than a few minutes of that.