4.5 Taboo language and slanguage  (Page 2/4)

TITANTIC. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates and Gloria Stuart. Directed by James Cameron.

This Titanic takes a long time to …(a)… . In fact, the three-hour movie lasts an hour longer than the real-life tragedy , which occurred when the “unsinkable” ship split in half on her maiden voyage of April 15, 1912 and sent 1500 souls to their deaths in the icy North Atlantic.

Not that director James Cameron’s epic is an actuality account. It is about a romance between two young people, Rose deWitt Bukater (Kate Winslett) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) from different social backgrounds, who fall in love on board the Titanic and who share the drama of the ship’s collision with an iceberg and the resultant confusion , chaos and tragedy.

The story of their brief, forbidden, love affair unfolds as a flashback told by a wrinkled old lady of 102 (played by 87-year-old Gloria Stuart) who was that once-beautiful Rose.

She tells her tale to a pair of brash treasure hunters involved in a salvage operation to cream any bounty they can still find from the watery innards of the two giant pieces of the ship which, in 1985, were found 4000 m below the surface.

What interest them particularly is her knowledge of a fabulous diamond necklace which they expected to find in the …(b)… of on the first class …(c)… , but which was missing when they finally succeeded in bringing that safe to the …(d)… .

… The old lady and her love affair which saved her from remaining a pampered girl in a gilded cage, engaged to a spoilt rich brat Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), is sensitively told.

And the convincing acting partnership developing between Winslet as the feisty Rose in first-class and DiCaprio, as the free-spirited and daring Jack in …(e)… , makes the improbable story work. Cameron has overplayed the strict social class system and the luxury on board the Titanic but underplayed the historically-known bunglings which contributed to the loss of life . He does make it clear that there were far too few lifeboats (more would have cluttered up the decks) but, almost as a throwaway line, lets it be known that there were no binoculars on the bridge .

The special effects are, however, excellent. Not so much the extended scenes of the water rushing into the cabins , …(f)… , passageways and smashing all before it, scenes which have been done before, but in the images of this huge ship gradually sinking lower and lower into the water before splitting in two.

In its final death throes, the Titanic’s …(g)… lifted 80 m out of the water and stood almost vertical to the ocean’s surface like the tail of a giant whale, before it crashed into the sea. Being an extra in the show must have been tough. Specially in those frenzied moments when people fought for a place on board the lifeboats ; or fell into the water from a dizzy height ‘ or floated in their life jackets as corpses snow white with cold. These sequences were filmed in an enormous tank and they feel like the real thing. Other telling moments are in the fiercely-hot engine rooms , where blackened men like galley slaves shovelled coal into furnaces to drive the ship to even greater speeds, for the satisfaction of their master dining in style in the first class.