Movie Review The Greatest

The Greatest (2010) 

Directed by Shana Feste 

Written by Shana Feste 

Starring Susan Sarandon, Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Simmons, Carey Mulligan, Michael Shannon, Aaron Johnson

Release Date April 2nd, 2010

Published April 2nd, 2010

“The Greatest” is notable for being the first film I've seen featuring derisive bell ringing. Pierce Brosnan gives the bell to his grieving wife played with anguish and abandon by Susan Surandon. She rings it at him as a rebuke to his attempt to reach out to her following the death of their son. What meaning the bell had was lost on me after Sarandon began so contemptuously ringing it.

”The Greatest,” the first feature from writer-director Shana Feste, is a film that wants to be about grief but plays more like an oddball indie film trying exceptionally hard to treat a familiar subject in an obscure fashion. Pierce Brosnan is Allan, a mathematics professor who was cheating on his wife Grace (Susan Sarandon) at the time their son Bennett (Aaron Johnson) was killed in a car accident.

The affair and everything else in their lives stops at this point as Allan becomes sleepless and confused while Grace becomes crazed and obsessed with what may have been 17 minutes of her son’s life before he died; minutes spent with the man whose truck hit Bennett's car, Jordan (Michael Shannon). Unfortunately, Jordan fell into a coma before anyone could account for the 17 minute conversation.

As Allan, Grace and their younger son Ryan (Johnny Simmons) fall into a routine of grief, sleeplessness, drugs and mania, Rose (Carey Mulligan) enters their life. Rose was Bennett's girlfriend and though she was in the car with Bennett when he was killed, no one in the family seems that interested in her until she shows up at their door three months pregnant.

Allan asks her to move in while Grace resents her and Ryan is a prick to her for reasons only he understands. Why Rose has no one else to live with is passed over briefly in a conversation with Allan but has no importance. She is a plot catalyst and her immediate proximity to the rest of the cast is a plot necessity.

Nothing in “The Greatest” feels remotely organic. It's all dramatic contrivance meant to give the cast a chance to rage in one direction or another. Some of the rage is quite compelling, even moving but mostly it feels like actors showing off the ability to rant and rave in a fashion that feels dramatic. 

Carey Mulligan, the deserving Oscar nominee for “An Education,” plays Rose as an oddball loner who upon moving into the home of her ex's family begins building an elaborate sheet castle in the spare bedroom. She's the kind of indie movie cutie who takes random photographs, typically not on a digital camera, has a pixie haircut and says the things that no one else is willing to say.

Sarandon finds moments of truth in the midst of wilding emotions. She has the film's best scene opposite Michael Shannon as the comatose man. The account of the 17 minutes is deeply moving and revealing and Shannon, a once and future Oscar contender, nails the moment.

”The Greatest” is far from terrible; it's merely off-putting in its overly dramatic fashion and typically offbeat indie movie-ness that has become as cliche as the mainstream dramas that “The Greatest” attempts to circumvent with its oddity.

Movie Review Nowhere Boy

Nowhere Boy (2009) 

Directed by Sam Taylor Wood

Written by Matt Greenhalgh

Starring Aaron Johnson, Kristen Scott Thomas,Thomas Brodie-Sangster, David Morrisey

Release Date December 26th, 2009 

Published April 15th, 2010 

Few actors have had as good a year as quietly as 21 year old Aaron Johnson. First he blasted off into stardom with his role as nerdy kid turned superhero in the wonderfully subversive “Kick Ass.” Then, in late 2010, Johnson turned his nerd image from “Kick Ass” on its ear with a brilliant turn as a teenaged John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy,” now on DVD.

“Nowhere Boy,” directed by newcomer Sam Taylor Wood, takes us through the teen years of the iconic Beatles co-founder John Lennon. The story begins in sadness as, after a brief introduction, young John Lennon loses his beloved Uncle George to a heart attack.

It was George who had fostered John’s creativity and interest in music under the disapproving gaze of John’s Aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas) With George gone the unmoored John falls in with his older Cousin, Stan (James Johnson) who leads John to the discovery of his mother Julia (Ann Marie Duff) who had surrendered him to his Aunt following the disappearance of his father a merchant seaman.

While visiting his mother, without telling his Aunt, John discovered Rock n’ Roll, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley. Julia bought John his first guitar and watched him learn to play in her living room. As John’s grades slip at school Mimi becomes suspicious and a family showdown is inevitable. Director Sam Taylor Wood takes a good deal of creative license to bring a little extra drama to the real life events of John Lennon’s formative years but there is nothing so dramatic or untrue that it will leave fans crying foul.

The key to “Nowhere Boy” is not in the dramatized narrative of John Lennon’s teen years anyway. Rather, the key is the lively and fresh faced performance of Aaron Johnson who captures both the cocksure, comic musician side of Lennon and the vulnerable boy at his heart. Lennon was forever affected by the strange role that his mother played in his life and that comes out throughout his musical career.

“Nowhere Boy” gets its juice not only from lending a Freudian context to Lennon’s later work but by dramatizing the history of The Beatles like never before. Sam Taylor Wood gives us as close an approximation as we are likely to get of the events that created the greatest rock band of all time.

Through the performances of Aaron Johnson as Lennon, Thomas Brodie Sangster as a pubescent Paul McCartney and Sam Bell as George Harrison we get a glimpse at music history never before seen. Nowhere Boy succeeds in revealing John Lennon and the ways his childhood influenced the rest of his life and when you hear songs like “Mother” you will flash back to this film and be awash in new and more poignant meanings.

The same could be said of several other Lennon solo records as well as Beatles classics should one want to parse their psychology but my point is merely that Nowhere Boy works as both a companion piece to the legendary John Lennon canon and as a stand alone drama of one young man’s journey toward unlikely success. In Aaron Johnson’s ultra-cool performance we get the John Lennon we imagined as a young man, cocky, funny and ungodly talented with just a hint of a haunted soul.