The Greatest (2009)

Directed by: Shana Feste | 96 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Carey Mulligan, Aaron Johnson, Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, Johnny Simmons, Kevin Hagan, Amy Morton, Deirdre O’Connell, Miles Robbins, Cara Seymour, Ramsey Faragallah, Jennifer Ehle, Colby Minifie, Maryann Urbano, Zoë Kravitz, Portia , Michael Shannon, Dante E. Clark, Lindsay Beamish, John Boyd, Hannah Hodson, Miriam Cruz

Bennett Brewer (Aaron Johnson) stops his car in the middle of the road to tell his new girlfriend Rose (Carey Mulligan) that he loves her. He soon discovers that it is not wise to do such a thing on an unlit road at night. A truck crash later is heaven for Bennett, and his family is having a hard time dealing with it. One day Rose is on the doorstep of the Brewers. She is pregnant with their deceased son and is looking for a roof over her head. Father Allen (Pierce Brosnan) soon embraces Rose, but Mother Grace (Susan Sarandon) isn’t waiting for the unexpected guest and the baby in her tummy. “It’s like someone gives you a puppy when your dog just died,” Grace says. Plus, if Bennett had never met Rose, the accident wouldn’t have happened. The gulf between Grace and Rose seems unbridgeable, but the shared grief leads to rapprochement.

Despite the heavy theme and a few emotional outliers, ‘The Greatest’ calmly ripples along to a hastily worked out and clichéd happy ending. In the film, all forms and stages of mourning are reviewed. Allen wants to pick up the thread again as soon as possible and is therefore not open to the grief of his wife. Grace obsessively tries to figure out how Bennett’s last minutes went. And Bennett’s brother Ryan (Johnny Simmons), the black sheep of the family, can’t bear the fact that Bennett has been canonized by his parents. Meanwhile, Rose tries to gather information about the boyfriend she actually only just met. In flashbacks we see how Rose and Bennett meet and fall in love. In these warm, intimate scenes, ‘The Greatest’ is at its best.

The rest of the film seems to be aimed at ticking off as many steps as possible from the grieving handbook. In addition, debuting director/screenwriter Shana Feste makes the mistake of wanting too much and taking unnecessary side paths. For example, we meet Allen’s anxious ex-mistress and a friend of Ryan’s who concocts a family tragedy to get attention. The result is an unbalanced film that, despite a few heavy scenes, is never as gripping as it could have been. Brosnan and Sarandon pull out all the stops and bounce from emotion to emotion like balls in a pinball machine, but still lose out to the more natural-playing Mulligan, who glues together the random-looking mourning fragments with her disarming performance. All in all ‘The Greatest’ is not a bad debut, but with more focus and subtlety it would have worked out a lot better.