Kate Winslet has achieved many feats over the course of her 25-year career: being the youngest person ever to hold six Oscar nominations, for example, or starring in movie classics from Sense and Sensibility to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But her most recent role – as herself, on Jimmy Kimmel’s chat show – has proved to be the most meaningful of all after the actress put a lifetime (well, 19 years’ worth) of wondering to bed by admitting that Jack could have been spared in Titanic – had Rose just budged up a little.
James Cameron’s 1997 sea epic – in which Winslet starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio – has long drawn the ire of fans, who believed there was enough space on Rose’s life raft for both to live. Instead, the debutante floats back to New York City (albeit after a rather nippy journey splayed across a door in the middle of the Atlantic) while penniless painter Jack is left to perish.
“There was plenty of room on the raft,” Kimmel remarked on Monday, to which the actress replied: “I know, I know…I agree, I think he could have actually fitted on that bit of door.”
Given that the ending of the world’s third highest grossing film has now been appropriately deconstructed, here are some other unrealistic film finales that could do with coming clean.
Grease has it all: teen angst, tight leather trousers, high school students sporadically bursting into song – but the excitement had clearly ramped up to an uncontrollable level by the time it came to writing the ending, when it was deemed logical that Sandy and Danny would pootle off in a flying car. As if the transformation of vanilla Sandy into a smoking seductress wasn’t a big enough suspension of our disbelief, the idea of the unlikely pair quite literally heading off into the sunset was a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-borrowed twist too far.
It’s a cinematic classic – two gals don their headscarves and sunnies for a crime-speckled ride around America before hurtling off a cliff. Some might wonder, though, whether plummeting into oblivion was a likely endpoint for the film’s leads.
Thelma and Louise
Yes, they had temporarily become vigilantes and been tracked down by the Feds, but airborne suicide seems like a bit of a dark way to go. In a more realistic envisioning, the pair would have parked up at the cliff’s edge, politely handed themselves into the authorities and thought long and hard about their behaviour during a brief yet life-affirming stint in prison.
Love Actually
Okay, so this particular scene happens part way through the film, but the rousing speech Hugh Grant gives as the British Prime Minister to his American counterpart is so detached from political reality it’s basically Nigel Farage. “Since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the President should be prepared for that,” he stirringly tells the nation, winning him the kind of patriotic adoration usually reserved for reminiscing about World War II, or the Great British Bake Off.
Dodgeball
The subtitle of this film is A True Underdog Story. If it was a real underdog story, however, the rag-tag gaggle of ball-throwers would have been eliminated in the first round, and the moustachioed meanies with biceps would have taken home the prize. There have been whispers that an alternate ending in which the bad guys win was ditched for the more heartwarming version we ended up with, but who can say.
Taken
As has now become apparent with many of the items in this list, ridiculous happenings aren’t only reserved for final scenes. But let us cast aside (most of) our cynicism for a moment and consider Taken, where a man goes on an international murdering spree, assaults a government official and nobody asks any questions about it whatsoever. Many thrillers do seem to operate under a this-crime-didn’t-happen-in-my-country-of-residence-and-thus-there-can-be-no-consequences mentality, so maybe we should allow it. But we won’t.
