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.
