What a difference 30 minutes could have made

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2000)

I have resisted seeing this movie for a long time. After all the ship sinks and given that they produce a survivor to tell the story I had a funny feeling that she too would survive. The whole where is the treasure thing was unneeded. The movie would have been better not as her story (which it could not have been since it continuously showed things about which she could not have known) but as her love story. No late twentieth century stuff just her in the end giving her name to the officer on the ship as they entered New York harbor. That would have been a perfectly acceptable end to a rather implausible love story.
The script is as ponderous as the movie is long. Then there is the how old are these two lover anyway factor. For DiCaprio's character to have done everything he had done would have made him much older and more jaded to the ways of the world, even movie version Americans lose their innocence after a while. And the paintings that Rose collects, aside from not having been painted at the time, her tastes reflect someone beyond her 18 or so years of script time, and she quotes Freud no less.
Never the less the actors give it their all and turn in some rather good performances. Kate Winslet and Kathy Bates being the best of the bunch and the fellow who plays Cal H. perhaps the weakest. I liked the captain and the ship's architect very much, they gave convincing performances of men who have tried and recognize their failure just a bit ahead of the rest.

Quibbles with the story are abundant. My personal one is why the lights were on as long as they were. My experience with electricity tells me that the lights would go out before the deck they are on is under water. In fact the whole ship would certainly have been much darker come final push into the water. And while we are on the subject of lights, I have seen a lot of cruise ships at night and none of them had so much light pouring out of every porthole (weren't some of the folks out to dinner or, heaven forbid, in bed?
So the movie is too long and didn't need to be by about thirty minutes just by cutting the modern day part out. It adds nothing but a phony treasure hunt.