The Greatest is a first time effort by writer/director Shana Feste. It often feels like an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, or something similarly long form, but is actually an original script. Or maybe, it feels like the aftermath of a Nicholas Sparks novel, as instead of leading up to a relationship ending in some sort of tragedy, this story begins with one and wallows in it’s destructive wake. Ever since Ordinary People won Best Picture, an entire dealing with grief genre has sprung up in film and this is the latest stab at milking the material for drama. People often call films like this “tearjerkers”, and with good reason. Sometimes, the manipulative lengths that these sorts of films go to in an attempt at creating a response from their audiences can make it begin to feel like the emotion is literally being yanked out of you. I’d prefer a story to have more subtlety. Overly dramatic situations, slow motion, and sappy music are an easy way out. Make me legitimately care about the characters and the response will come. I want to have my tears eased out of me, not jerked out of me. The Greatest at least attempts to earn moments of real emotion, but I’m not sure that it succeeds.
The focus of the film is on a family torn apart by a son’s death. The opening scenes introduce us to a high school senior by the name of Bennett Brewer (Aaron Johnson) and his newly acquired teen squeeze Rose (Carey Mulligan). Bennett is the Captain America of his high school. Head of all the clubs, voted most likely to whatever; people think he’s just “the greatest”. But putting lame movie titles aside and getting back on track: after some appropriately enthusiastic cherry popping we join Bennett and Rose on a post coital drive home. A smile plays across Bennett’s face, overcome with joy at what it is to be young, white, upper class, and sexually active, he brazenly decides to stop his car in the middle of an intersection to declare eternal love to his newfound raison d'être. But before Rose can respond… whammy! Car crash, out of nowhere. Bennett is dead, and suddenly we’re face to face with his family as they silently leave his funeral in the back of a limousine. The father, Allen (Pierce Brosnan), stares straight ahead, unsure of where to look or how to act. The mother, Grace (Susan Sarandon), and the younger brother, Ryan (Johnny Simmons), stare out of opposite windows, disengaged, mentally checked out. These are our main characters. Their grief will become our entertainment. But instead of being a straight pity party, The Greatest gives us a twist. The grieving process is interrupted when Rose shows up at the Brewer’s home, three months pregnant and looking for someplace to stay. Can they all begin to heal old wounds and learn to love again?
Despite the fact that it was made by a first time director, The Greatest is competently put together. Early on, during Bennett and Rose’s conversation in the car, I was worried the editing was going to be distractingly hurried and choppy. The framing was always on the face of the person talking, back and forth, back and forth, never giving us any reaction shots, any room to breath. My fears were instantly sated when, post crash, we were treated to the still shot of the family that lasted well over a minute. Clearly the editing was a choice, juxtaposing the confused ecstasy of new love with the sobering permanence of death. Relaxed, I settled in a bit, confident to put myself in the filmmaker’s hands, and ended up finding the cinematography of the film serviceable, if not spectacular. The camera work is utilitarian, non invasive, and while a bit more imagination with how things were presented would have been appreciated, the style of the film puts the focus squarely on the acting. The film is the four main characters and the journey they take, and it lives and dies on whether or not we become invested in their struggles.
Brosnan’s character and performance are my favorite in the film. He sits in his bed every morning, alarm clock in his hands, knowing that the second it goes off his wife is going to begin weeping. His life and family are falling apart around him, and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about it. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t emote, and he won’t even speak to his family about anything other than mundane pleasantries. He has internalized all of his feelings and slowly, over the course of the film, we watch them eat him apart from the inside. There are hints at infidelities in his past, and his relationship with his wife is closed off as a result. While she is breaking, he must sit idly by and watch. When Rose comes into the Brewer’s lives it is Allen that takes to her most readily. He is eager for the distraction, ready to occupy his mind with tasks other than dealing with his son’s death. They go to the movies, go to a party, the whole time we watch as his face gets paler, the circles under his eyes get darker, and his attempts at filling his life with something other than grief get more and more desperate. Brosnan’s charming yet restrained performance lends a lot of credibility to the film, and often grounds it when it wants to go spinning off into melodrama.
Sarandon’s character doesn’t quite come off the same way. Of the three surviving members of the family, Grace is the most visibly traumatized. While I found the other characters to be ultimately underwritten, Grace went completely to the other end of the spectrum. Much of the hand ringing and teeth gnashing, emotional peep show aspect of the film comes into play during scenes involving Sarandon. She has become obsessed with the minute details of the last 17 minutes of her son’s life. She sits at the bedside table of the comatose man that crashed into Bennett’s car, waiting for him to wake up and give her some kind of hint at what the specifics of the accident were. As she is so attentively caring for this stranger, she neglects the wellbeing of her own family. Grace’s pain is selfish, singular. She lashes out at the people around her. She hates them for not being as broken up as she is. She breaks down when the maid cleans Bennett’s room; she breaks down when she passes his favorite breakfast cereal. All of the clichéd, post mortem, negative behavior that you’ve seen in other, similar films gets personified by this one character. She rejects Rose and her baby as poor replacements for her oldest son. She ignores her surviving son and her husband to concentrate on her own issues. She insults, she shuns, she accuses; after a while her negative behavior begins to be too much and she becomes a grief monster rather than a real person feeling real emotions. When her character finally breaks down, realizes her mistakes, and comes to grips with her son’s death, it is all too late. She’s been too hateful, selfish, and stupid, and you just can’t come back around to feeling for her. I blame this not on Sarandon, but on the screenplay. She’s really given nothing to work with to craft a redeemable character. If we were just given a few brief moments of tenderness or vulnerability every once in a while, one indication that there’s still a wife and a mother lurking somewhere inside of her, then maybe something could have been done performance wise to create a more three dimensional character; but that moment never comes. Even in a moment that looked to become cathartic where Grace and Allen are thrown fully clothed into the ocean during a particularly intense argument, nothing breaks. The two walk away just as upset with each other as they were, the tension remains. Sarandon is left out to dry.
The character of Ryan is an interesting one. He’s taken in multiple directions over the course of the film, but never quite gets to go anywhere. We’re told early on that he has had problems with drugs in the past, and that he’s tested weekly by his parents. He is self-described as the screw up of the family, and harbors some resentment toward his brother for always being the perfect child. We’re given a subplot where he starts going to a support group for teenagers who have lost family members, and it seems like it might lead to him working out his issues with his brother, but instead it goes in the direction of a budding romance. Ryan meets Ashley (Zoe Kravitz), a pretty young thing who has also lost a sibling. They hit it off instantly, bonding over the overwrought nature of the meeting, and quickly their flirtation begins. Ryan’s mood picks up when he’s around Ashley, and it then seems that through this mini love story his character will find his chance to heal. All of this comes to a halt, however, when the romance is suddenly swept under the rug due to a sudden, incomprehensible plot twist that ends the relationship, sends Ryan into an emotional spiral, and then never sees the Ashley character mentioned again. Desperate and despondent at lost love, Ryan tears into his room, finds his drug stash, and ingests several pills, and then… nothing. There are no consequences to him getting high again, he never resolves things with Ashley, and his character arch is given no sort of resolution whatsoever. I guess that all had to be excised to add in a couple more scenes of Sarandon acting like a bitch.
The real featured player here, though, has to be Mulligan. After her Oscar nominated performance in An Education everyone was very eager to see what she would do next. In my review of An Education, I said that while Mulligan did a good job, the nomination might have been more a case of the perfect part, rather than the perfect actress. After seeing The Greatest I can confidently say that that isn’t true. This character Rose, to put it mildly, is not the perfect part, and what Mulligan is able to accomplish with what little she is given proves that she is the real deal. All of the Audrey Hepburn comparisons that have been bandied about in regards to Mulligan are bound to continue after this one. She exudes maturity and grace every second that she is on screen. She has soulful eyes; she’s able to tell a million different stories with her smile. Her character, as we’re presented with it, is never grieving. She’s strong, capable, curious, and trying to make the best of her situation. We’re told that she has nowhere to stay because her only family is a rehab bound mother, but we’re never given any indication of a traumatic past. We’re never given any sort of past for her whatsoever, as a matter of fact. We know she is intelligent, artistic, and loving, but we’re never told who she is or where she came from. How did a girl with such a traumatic home life turn out so fully formed and capable? It seems that the only reason we’re told she has a drug addicted mother is so that the film has an excuse to put her in the Brewer’s house. She’s not a girl; she’s a plot development. She exists in this film as a sort of magical force of healing power and little else. She sweeps into the Brewer’s broken lives with an open heart, insightful words of wisdom, and an eagerness to help them overcome their loss; but why? Who is she? How did this teenage girl get so wise? Why is she having so little difficulty overcoming her own huge obstacles, that we’re never even confronted with any scenes of her experiencing difficulties being a parentless, single, teen mother with no income or place to live? At no point in the film does she feel like a real person, just an ideal. But at no point in the film are you able to dislike her. Mulligan is so good at becoming that ideal that you can’t help but want to spend more time with her. When Sarandon’s character is throwing herself on the ground crying, you wish you were spending more time with Rose as she decorates her room. When Brosnan’s character is bleary eyed and unresponsive at his job, you wish you were at another party with Rose writing on her belly with a magic marker. Since Mulligan is able to make you like her character, you can never hate the film, but because the screen writing is never able to convince you that she’s a real person, you can’t bring yourself to really love it either.
Despite the lead characters being hit or miss, I would say the most damning thing about the movie is that it does, in its third act, become a tearjerker. I wouldn’t consider it a spoiler to say that the film details a period of time where its characters are overcome by grief, it builds to a breaking point where they’ve finally had enough, and then it gives us a resolution where they’ve learned to get past their pain and move on. That’s what these movies do, that’s what they are. Where The Greatest fails, is that it exists more as a showcase of big moments rather than as an organically unfolding story. There are no transitions from moment to moment, no real tension or sense of where any of the characters are going. Each character’s subplot comes off like a series of unconnected vignettes until they all crash together, reaching desperation filled climaxes at exactly the same time in an over the top fashion. Allen has enough and finally lets out his emotions, Grace finds what she’s looking for and lets her anger go, Ryan takes drugs and then, uh, comes down from them, and when they’ve all reached places where they’re ready to come back together as a family, its Rose who acts as the catalyst to make it happen. It’s tired, you see it all coming a mile away, it happens too suddenly, and it’s not presented with enough complexity. The characters go from being deeply and simultaneously traumatized to being completely fine all in the matter of minutes with three conveniently timed breakdowns into tears and one conveniently timed childbirth. It all happens in service of the plot, its presented so forcefully with broad acting and sweeping music that you’re not given any choice about how you’re supposed to feel about things, and in the end I just flat out didn’t buy into any of it.
What The Greatest has going for it is a quartet of actors that try their best to take a sappy, disjointed story and make the best of it. The script is riddled with plot holes and subtlety issues, but the performances are engaging enough that you never entirely give up on it at any point. The Greatest never really deals much with the issue of abortion, but Rose explains to Allen at one point why she decided to keep her baby. She says that despite the fact that she only knew Bennett for a short matter of weeks, she knew that he was the love of her life, and that’s why she had to keep his baby. That someone you’ve known so briefly could be the love of your life is the immature notion of a teenage girl; we as an audience know better. But despite this, the film presents us the concept with a straight face, not so much as a wink or a smile. We’re supposed to accept the fact that he is truly the love of her life at face value, because the story is running on pure sentiment. The Greatest is a teenage girl of a movie, and while that is probably great for some people, I was looking for something a bit more mature.
