8 December 2001
Fans of Titanic the movie may have mixed emotions at Kate Winslet singing “What if I had never let you go?” If you’d made room on the raft, Kate, there’d have been no need to let go! Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn’t still be at the bottom of the north Atlantic in icicle form today! Oh well. It’s easy to be wise after the event. (Also, we know now that Leo would have let Kate go on her 25th birthday with haste, so it all worked out for the best.)
Anyway, this song is from an animated movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and specifically from the scene where a young Scrooge turns away from his sweetheart, Belle, and turns towards his true love, money. I haven’t seen this particular version: I’m more a fan of The Muppet Christmas Carol and Scrooge McDuck. Still, ‘What If’ takes a strange slant on that scene: essentially Belle beating herself up, when in fact the story firmly blames Scrooge for letting her go. Perhaps “What if you hadn’t been such a money-grabbing bollix?” wouldn’t have made such family-friendly festive listening, although we are the nation that made Christmas number ones of ‘Stan’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’.
Storyline qualms aside, while it’s no classic and essentially Big Ballad 101, this is a pleasant enough breeze to be wafting down from the top of our Christmas charts. For someone not a singer by trade, Winslet does a solid job in carrying the tune and selling its melodrama. Yes, the climactic snare thump and key change suggest that Whitney’s dreaded ‘I Will Always Love You’ was foremost in the thoughts of team ‘What If’, but mercifully it’s only a brief flutter at the end rather than a full-on deluge. Ultimately, better this than ‘Stan’ or ‘Fairytale Of New York’ as our Christmas number one, that’s for sure.
