Why We Hated Titanic: A Review

On Saturday, April 4, 1998, we finally succumbed to all the hype and went to see Titanic. This film won 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director; has earned more than enough money to compensate for its enormous $200 million cost; and is so popular that people are returning to see it more than once.

Yet, we hated it. The Arts and Entertainment cable network's Titanic documentary conveyed more of the history and feel of the turn of the century and more of the horror and despair of the disaster, than James Cameron's bloated Oscar winner.

Here are some of the specific reasons we found Titanic to be so distasteful.

1. The love story. The film's centerpiece is the fictional love affair between a young, high-society woman named Rose (Kate Winslet) and a self-confident, young, impoverished artist named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). The love story is highly unsatisfying for a number of reasons:
   
   
   • Rose's behavior is implausible. She's a high-society girl, presumably raised in the sheltered environment that was the upper class of the early 1900s. Her fiancé is wealthy upper-crust as well, but treats her like chattel, setting him up as the villain to Jack's hero. Nevertheless, it's difficult to swallow her attraction to the world-wise, lower-class Jack. He may be charming (certainly, the character is intended to have a roguish charm), but she's upper-class, with years of indoctrination in her sheltered, pampered lifestyle; that she could chuck her entire support structure for an uncertain life with a poor artist strains credibility.
     
     But director Cameron isn't content merely to strain credibility: He breaks it completely. In one scene, Rose has stolen away with Jack to a party in the lower decks -- a rowdy party, with plenty of drinking and dancing. The scene is clearly meant to convey the honest, earthy pleasures of the common people. Rose leaps into the spirit of the party as if she belongs there, at one point kicking off her shoes and dancing with Jack on a table top, while a makeshift band supplies Irish-style dance music and a host of others dance and cheer nearby. Certainly, the third-class party looks far more interesting and loads more fun than the stuffy drawing-room posturing going on in first-class, but that's not the point. In 1912, a girl of Rose's station, with little exposure to any world outside the rarefied atmosphere of high-society, would be more likely to find the beer-hall carousing of the common man to be frightening, not stimulating. The jostling, the dancing, the noise, the occasional fistfight: That sort of revelry would have been totally outside her experience, and it's hard to believe she'd be willing or able to leap so easily into it. Yet, within 10 minutes' screen time, she's carousing like she was born to it. In another scene, while fleeing her fiancé's valet (see Formulaic filmmaking, below), Rose gives the valet the finger -- a gesture that's extremely out of character. All in all, Rose does not behave as a turn-of-the-century, upper-class young woman would have behaved.
     
     
   • Rose's decision to abandon her life of leisure for Jack is treated lightly, without explanation. Her attraction to Jack begins after he saves her from committing suicide. But there's little portrayal of the kind of indecision and agonizing one would expect of a woman who's contemplating leaving her safe, wealthy cocoon for an uncertain, unpredictable life with a lower-class man she just met. Instead, in one scene, Rose's mother berates her for her continuing attention to the young artist -- hammering home the lesson by reminding Rose that their fortune is gone, courtesy of bad debts left by Rose's late father. In the next scene, Rose is back in the high-society fold, taking an afternoon tour of the ship with her fiancé, mother, and other upper crust types. Somehow Jack manages to intercept her without anyone noticing (of course), and he pulls her aside. She tells him she can no longer see him; he says that's fine, as long as she's really happy. Later that evening, she returns to him, saying she's "changed her mind." There is no explanation for her sudden change of heart, and there is no longer a single hesitant bone in her body. Jack's the man for her, never mind her background or lifestyle. Ah, Hollywood.
     
     
   • Jack is an aspiring artist. Early on, while still deciding whether or not to fall in love with him, Rose leafs through Jack's sketch notebook and finds charcoal nude studies of a woman he knew in Paris. Instead of being shocked, as a typical sheltered upper-class lady of her time would have been, Rose is intrigued, to the point of wondering whether he slept with her. She neither blushes nor flinches when he denies having sex with the model, telling Rose the woman was a "one-legged prostitute." A young woman of Rose's station would hardly take such a revelation so easily in stride.
     
     Later in the film, after Rose has made her momentous, three-scene decision to cast her lot with Jack, she asks him to sketch her in the nude. Quick as a flash, she's reclining naked on the sofa in her stateroom, and Jack's sketching away. Once again, the idea that an inexperienced young woman from the highest stratum of American society would so quickly disrobe for a man she's known only a few days seems highly unlikely. Equally unlikely is the idea that the nudity would be her idea; it's far more realistic that the more worldly Jack would have to cajole a reluctant Rose into posing nude.
     
     
   • Jack has amazingly free access to the upper decks for a steerage-class passenger. It's hard to imagine that the Titanic crew permitted their first-class passengers to be so easily "contaminated" by the common folk.
     
     
   • The entire romance has a Disney cartoon or fairy tale quality to it. Throughout the film, Jack and Rose's love affair is not balanced by a single interaction typical of a normal relationship between two adults.
   
   
   
2. Mediocre acting. It's telling that of Titanic's 11 Oscars, not one was for acting. Maybe it's the script, maybe it's the director, maybe the actors themselves are at fault, but the entire ship seems peopled by two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Only the stellar Kathy Bates turns in a truly worthwhile performance -- and her role, as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, is little more than a walk-on. Director Cameron was quoted as saying he chose many of the actors specifically for their resemblance to the real historical figures. Certainly, the actor portraying the Captain resembles his real-life counterpart, as does the actor portraying Bruce Ismay, Director of the White Star Line. It seems that Cameron placed a higher premium on the actors' looks than on their talents.
   
   Of course, he was under no such constraints when casting the parts of Jack and Rose, since neither character existed on the real Titanic. One can only assume he chose Leonardo DiCaprio for the young heartthrob's box office appeal; it certainly could not have been for DiCaprio's acting ability. DiCaprio's portrayal of Jack makes him appear to be doing a poor Brad Pitt impersonation. On the other hand, perhaps the problem really does lie with the direction and the script; prior to Titanic, we would've sworn Kate Winslet had some serious potential as an up-and-coming actress. Yet her performance in Titanic lacks any depth or conviction. (However, Winslet does succeed in completely shedding her British accent, doing an excellent upper-class American accent.)
   
   
3. Formulaic filmmaking. Cameron managed to sneak quite a few Hollywood clichés into Titanic. At one point, Rose's fiancé has charged his valet with tracking down the errant lovers. Naturally, it doesn't take long for him to spot Rose and Jack, giving Cameron an excuse to work in a classic Hollywood chase scene. Since it is a typical chase scene, it seems to go on forever, adding nothing to the plot and little to our understanding of any of the characters.
   
   Two-thirds of the way through the film, of course, Jack and Rose's epic love affair is interrupted by an iceberg. At that point, the film begins slowly but inexorably to sink into a Poseidon Adventure rip-off. People fall through skylights, water crashes through bulkheads, dishes come crashing down, drinks slide off tables, and there is much screaming and wailing. While all this is going on, Rose and Jack are in the lower decks, working their way back up to the top through all kinds of harrowing perils; like true action figures, neither one suffers as much as a scratch. In fact, Rose shows almost superhuman strength, as she plows through deep, rushing water in an ankle-length gown -- surprising, when one considers the sedentary lifestyle she must have led up to that point. Further, while Rose and Jack are struggling through all that water, they are somehow immune to its bitter cold. Hypothermia does not rear its inconvenient head until well after the star-crossed lovers are floating together in the freezing Atlantic.
   
   
4. Gratuitous mayhem. While the ship is sinking, of course, we are treated to all manner of human catastrophe. Cameron shows countless people sliding hundreds of feet down a tilted deck, crashing into obstacles on the way. As the boat sinks and the stern tips skyward, many people fall great distances to the water -- but that's not good enough. Cameron sees fit to show one man bouncing sickeningly off one of the now-still propellers before continuing his fatal descent into the ocean. When the ship snaps in two, the stern smashes back down into the ocean before sinking; naturally, we are treated to the spectacle of the massive hull crashing down on the hapless people already in the water.
   
   Most of this mayhem is completely pointless. The A&E documentary did a far better job of conveying the utter horror of the experience through still photos, narration, and the recollections of survivors. By contrast, Titanic's non-stop disaster-film action is merely a disgusting adaptation of Hollywood action film sensibilities, lacking any shred of humanity or respect. Cameron's passengers are not real people dying horrible deaths; they are little more than pawns to be tossed overboard in what resembles a high-tech video game. Clearly, the audience is jaded by this mindless violence. In our theater, laughter punctuated much of this action.
   
   
5. Cardboard people and selective history. By focusing on the nonexistent romance between Jack and Rose, Cameron made a true Hollywood epic. By tossing in special effects that would've made Irwin Allen jealous, Cameron ensured that his bloated film would receive at least one Oscar for technical filmmaking. The resulting film, however, succeeds in ignoring the true horror of the sinking of the Titanic. Thousands of people died horrible, watery deaths, stuck below decks or unable to find room in lifeboats. Many of these people were poor folk, on their way to start new lives in a new land. Their stories were not told at all. They are nothing more than cardboard people, a backdrop for the real story. Only twice does Cameron bring any sense of humanity to the lower decks: During the previously mentioned party scene, and when the boat is sinking. In the latter case, he shows a young Irish mother telling a hopeful fairy tale to her tiny children, knowing full well the boat is sinking and they will all die; he also briefly shows an old couple lying in bed clutching one another, while water runs beneath their bed. These brief scenes are the only really touching moments in the entire film.
   
   Cameron does show the quiet courage of the string band, whose members continued playing until the ship went down, to help keep the crowds calm and restore some sense of normalcy to the horrifying situation. (Of course, Cameron has them playing on the outer deck, where their fingers would soon have been too cold to play; in reality, they played in the first class lounge on "A" deck. They played almost until the end. Every member of the band died.) However, Cameron ignores many of the other instances of heroism that occurred on the sinking ship. For example, the men of the engine room reputedly toiled deep in the bowels of the sinking ship, keeping the liner's lights blazing for as long as possible, knowing that complete darkness would exacerbate the panic on the deck -- and knowing that staying below-decks sealed their own fate.
   
   Never mind the story Cameron tells; the real story is far more compelling.
   
   

That America considers this film to be so good is a shame, for it basically reduces a horrible event of momentous consequence to a typical Hollywood puff piece better left for a TV Movie of the Week.

What a titanic disappointment.