The Greatest

"I want to know everything I would know if he was still alive. I want more memories of him."

After their teenage son Bennett (Aaron Johnson) dies in an accident, Allen and Grace (Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon) are left unable pick up the pieces and move on after his death. But when the young woman (Carey Mulligan) who's carrying Bennett's unborn baby arrives at their doorstep with nowhere else to go, the tension and pain of Bennett's death is brought forward in a way that will either destroy the family, or finally push them towards dealing with their grief. Scenes of Rose and Bennett's relationship before his death are also woven throughout the movie, and provide a nice way to better know the two characters.

The Greatest started off pretty well. The scenario of a family struggling with the loss of a child isn't an uncommon one, but the cast seemed well on their way to delivering a solid story about loss and healing. Mulligan was excellent, and Brosnan and Sarandon were solid, even though they occasionally didn't quite deliver the emotion that they were reaching for in a few scenes. No, my problem with The Greatest wasn't the actors or the premise, it was the writing.

The story takes the oddest detours at times, often with little relevance to, well...the actual story. This really seemed apparent with the character of Ryan, whose entire subplot with the girl he meets has little relevance on his character arc, and made his resolution feel artificial, as a result. And Rose and Allen's trip to a teenage party seemed completely out of place, and I was left wondering what it was supposed to add to the story. The characters also didn't appear to have a truly solid identity, and as a result, some of their decisions and interactions didn't come off as genuine. It's like writer and director Shana Feste had ideas about what she wanted to see happen in the movie, but didn't bother to build those ideas around relatable and believable characters. A movie like this depends on making a connection between the audience and the characters, and at times, that connection felt very hollow, for me.

The Greatest is an okay movie, but I'm convinced that it could have been much better with a script written by someone with a better grasp on creating solid characters.

A family is torn apart with grief when the eldest son is killed in a car crash. All the members of the family deal with the loss in different ways, alienating each other in the process. Things get even more complicated when a young woman turns up, pregnant with the dead son's child.

For a lot of the time, 'The Greatest' is a very depressing movie. There's a lot of crying, or people on the verge of crying, or people trying their best not to cry, and that isn't the most pleasant viewing experience in the world. However, to give credit where credit's due, writer/director Shana Feste has done a solid job of making it engaging and watchable. The subject matter is very interesting – how do a mother and father cope when their son dies? How does a young boy cope without his older brother? How does a young woman cope without the love of her life? Feste does a very good job of portraying the different expressions of grief and, while it's a bit depressing, it's also a bit cathartic.

Annoyingly though, the film starts to go a bit downhill in the final third. There's a since of harsh reality in that first two-thirds, but it gets a bit hokey towards the end. The film is immediately predictable, which is tough to avoid. But rather than offer some surprises, the movie gives you exactly what you expected, and does it with a healthy dose of Hollywood-esque melodrama.

Probably the most interesting character is Grace Brewer, played by Susan Sarandon. Obsessed with knowing every detail about her son's death, she seems to border on insanity at times. Ryan (Johnny Simmons) is also excellent as the younger brother, who is living in denial. It is a subtle performance from the young actor, and his eventual breakdown is one of the most emotional moments of the entire film.

And then you have the big let-down and the big show-stealer. The let-down first: Pierce Brosnan. The guy makes a great 007, a great one. But here, he felt really out of place. Brosnan is a good actor, don't get me wrong, but he has an AWFUL American accent and just isn't emotive enough. And on the opposite end of the spectrum is Carey Mulligan, the show-stealer. I love watching this girl act; she is a fantastic actress who never seems to put a step wrong. While her character in the movie might not have a lot of depth, she still manages to breathe life into it. Her personal journey is the one I felt most attached to and, again, it's predictable but interesting.

'The Greatest' is a very typical independent movie. A strong cast with good performances, an unconventional story that's solidly told, but with a number of flaws that stops it from getting better commercial success. It does have enough to warrant a watch, though. You might even shed a tear or two.

THE GREATEST is a small film, quietly made in 28 days by first-time writer/director Shana Feste. The story/script is so unusual and touching that she was able to gather a rather extraordinary cast to bring this delicate story to life. It remains amazing to many of us that while the audiences flock to the gigantic CGI big noisy flicks, little jewels such as this film go completely unnoticed. The only hope is that enough people see this film now on DVD that that both the message of the movie and the quality of the acting and production gain the attention THE GREATEST so justly deserves.

Without introductory remarks the film opens with a brief prelude of the love between two (just graduated from high school) youngsters who after their first encounter with love pause on the drive home to attempt to make their feelings into words and BAM - a truck plunges into them and the boy Bennett (Aaron Johnson) is killed while the girl Rose (Carey Mulligan) is spared. The camera takes us rather abruptly to the graveside where the grieving parents Grace (Susan Sarandon) and Allen (Pierce Brosnan) and their young drug addicted son Ryan (Johnny Simmons) stare blankly into the hole that has been placed in the middle of their lives. None of the family copes with the death well: Grace can't stop talking and crying about Bennett and searches for a way to find out how Bennett spent the last 17 minutes of his life (that time between the accident and his death) to the point of attending to the truck driver (Michael Shannon) in coma at the local hospital, awaiting his recovery to learn about those 17 minutes; Allen is unable to sleep and tries to cope with the tragedy by not allowing mention of it in his home; Ryan, now on frequent tests to see if he is drug free, attempts to relate to a group therapy session of kids whose siblings have died.

Into this dysfunctional crumbling decimated family comes Rose, three months later, pregnant with Bennett's child, seeking refuge from a mother who is an addict. She is invited to move in, despite the fact that Grace loathes the idea and thinks Allen is merely trying to resolve the grief he has ever faced by attaching to Bennett's only girlfriend. The remainder of the story reveals how each of these injured four characters gradually interact and by bearing their personal grief with their own life problems manage to find a place where they can recover together.

The acting is superb as one would expect from such a talented cast: Carey Mulligan again shows us that she is an important emerging actress; Susan Sarandon allows us to see and understand the degrees of near insanity that grief for loss of a child can distort a life; and Pierce Brosnan proves he is a first-rate actor, managing a difficult role with great sensitivity. The rest of the cast is also excellent in very minor roles - Jennifer Ehle as an ex-lover of Allen, Aaron Johnson and Johnny Simmons as the brothers, and Michael Shannon as the driver of the truck who gradually awakens form his come to make Grace face some truths. As for Shana Feste, she is a strong artist and we should be seeing more beautifully crafted stories from her.

Grady Harp

The Greatest (2009)

A crisis of youth becomes a crisis for a whole family, and it's serious stuff. There's an attempt, very conspicuous in gesture and angst filled expressions, to be gritty and real, and it's a believable scenario. It's a tearjerker, surely, an intimate psychodrama dripping in sentiment.

However, the movie depends almost purely on this terrible crisis to succeed, and that's actually slightly backwards, in movie terms. That is, it should be the writing and acting that sweeps us in and makes us share the grief of the main characters. You end up wanting to empathize, but it's sometimes despite the movie, which pushes very hard, like a friend who wants to make you feel bad about something. It has such touching moments it's hard to quite accept that a lot of it is clumsily written, almost like a high budget beginner's film, which sounds worse than I mean it. But you'll see, I think, even if you love it thoroughly, that it works modestly. So accept its flaws, ignore the obvious flashbacks to the good times, skip the dining room table where people are sitting all on one side so we can see them all from the camera, ignore the patter that is meant to make life ordinary and doesn't, and so on. Be forgiving or give it a pass.

What saves the movie (somewhat) from its excesses is the performance of the lead girl, Rose (Carey Mulligan), and the father, Mr. Brewer, played by Pierce Brosnan, who is a nuanced dad, whatever his James Bond pedigree, though neither one is given decent lines to work with. (Brosnan was also a producer, go figure.) The mother is meant to be disturbed in her grief, and she sure is. The sexy grad assistant is too too obvious even for the movies. And the brother, well, what is his role, actually, just to add a second improbable plot? And there is surveillance video of the crash, which is beyond even reasonable open-mindedness, given the isolation implied by the first several minutes of the movie. The sensationalism of that, alone, will warn you of what's to come.

Okay, one last confession. It gets so emotionally atomic at times, with the throbbing cellos coming in the background, I had to laugh out loud. I swear. And yet, I see how it deals with some truly, believably gorgeous stuff.

This film is about a family who grief over the loss of their son in a traffic accident. This process is complicated by the unexpected arrival of a teenage girl who claims to have their son's unborn child.

"The Greatest" is powerful and touching. The mother, played by the amazing Susan Sarandon, is relentless in knowing the truth about her son's final moments. She gives such a moving performance that anyone gets saddened by her tragic loss. Carey Mulligan also deserves mention, as she displays a spectrum of convincing emotions effortlessly. Judging by the stream of great movies she is in, she will be a big star and Hollywood knows it.

"The Greatest" is a powerful story that moves anyone easily. As Susan Sarandon's character says, once your child is born, a woman knows that her child is the greatest. It is easy to relate to this statement, and yet everyone seems to be forgetting to celebrate this fact. As this film shows, you never know what you have got until its gone. "The Greatest" is a powerful reminder that you should treasure your family before its too late.