Titanic Town

by Sam Adams

recommended

That Titanic Town takes place in Belfast in 1972 tells you all you need to know about the film’s setting. The Troubles are at their height, and the streets of Belfast’s Catholic neighborhoods echo regularly with gunfire; IRA gunmen, British soldiers and ordinary residents alike fall victim to shots fired from unseen rifles. (The title, incidentally, comes from the fact that the doomed ocean liner was constructed in Belfast, although its significance is never really made clear.)

It’s this random bloodshed that the McPhelimy family hopes to escape, by moving from the Falls Road — central Belfast’s largest Catholic ghetto — to the more remote regions of West Belfast. But Bernie McPhelimy (Julie Walters) soon finds out that her new neighborhood is no safer than her old one. Her friend is shot dead in the street while watching Bernie’s son, and her husband Aidan (Ciarán Hinds) is arrested by British security forces with no warning or reason.

While she’s no supporter of the British occupation, Bernie is hardly a fan of the IRA; in her mind, both sides bear the blame for making it unsafe for her children to walk the streets. And it’s that attitude that gets her in trouble, once Bernie McPhelimy takes her first steps towards suing for peace (an idea ahead of its time in 1972, and perhaps now as well). When she shows up at a "Women for Peace" meeting run by Protestants, she’s treated like a Judas by her neighbors, many of whom have sons or husbands in Long Kesh jail. But the ensuing hoopla — and her willingness to criticize the IRA — gets Bernie’s face on the news, and once that happens, her life begins to transform. Before you know it, and almost before she does, Bernie has become the public face of a burgeoning peace movement, as well as one of its only supporters.

Titanic Town’s story is a true one, at least in so far as Bernie McPhelimy’s existence is concerned. But the film has little interest in building up to climactic events or stuffing us full of historical details. That it’s adapted from a novel (by Mary Costello) probably has something to do with the film’s favoring the transformations within Bernie as opposed to those without. Titanic Town has obvious connections to the recent rash of films on the Troubles, most particularly Some Mother’s Son, but its approach is closer to that of a movie like The Insider, where the way history is made is less important than the toll exacted on those who find themselves in the unlikely position of making it. Visually, the two movies couldn’t be more different; Roger Michell’s direction is as simple as Michael Mann’s was forceful. But what they have in common is confused and sometimes unlikable protagonists, whose personal virtues are rarely the equal of their public actions.

Titanic Town is unfortunately saddled with a bildungsroman framework which adds nothing to the story, although Nuala O’Neill is quite fine as Bernie’s daughter. But even if it’s superfluous, you know why the coming-of-age angle is there: to point up the fact that Bernie is coming of age as well. At first, she’s a flustered housewife, and every time she’s interviewed she says something she’ll have to correct in a future interview. (That’s the excuse she makes for the exposure, that she’s just trying to "put things right.") She’s terrified of the IRA, intimidated by the Brits, and scorned by the people she’s supposedly trying to help. But her stubbornness substitutes for confidence until real confidence arrives. Bernie does what no one else will simply because she’s too foolhardy not to.

As Walters plays her, Bernie’s less Erin Brockovich than Edith Bunker; it’s not charisma that brings people to her cause, but endurance. There are other, more educational movies on the Troubles, but I can’t think of one with as much personal resonance as Titanic Town, one that so effectively undermines the legacy of claims and counterclaims which, among other things, continues to kneecap the peace process. There are no fists in the air, no rabble-rousing climax, but the less Titanic Town tries to inspire, the more it succeeds in doing so.