FILM REVIEW
The Greatest
By Sumaya Samarasinghe
It begins like a typical teenage love story. A young couple becoming intimate for the first time, and then a silly mistake.
The boy, Bennett stops his car in the middle of an empty road, in the night, to tell Rose how much he loves her, a speeding pick up truck crashes into them.
In the next sequence, Allen, played by an impressive Pierce Brosnan lies in bed holding his alarm clock, his wife Grace is asleep by his side seemingly peacefully until the alarm goes off and she remembers that this is the morning she will be burying their son. The dynamics are set, Allen keeps it together and Grace played by a hurt and broken Susan Sarandon will fall apart endlessly searching for reasons and solutions which will help her understand the tragedy of her loss.
The Greatest is about that and how one deals with the loss of a loved one. The Brewer family copes in several different ways. Allen holds it all in until he is physically unable to handle it anymore; Ryan the younger son finds comfort through pot and other forms of drugs and Grace, she needs answers even from the pick up truck driver who is the only one who saw Bennett alive before he himself fell into a coma. This dysfunctional family balance could go on without a problem until Rose walks in, pregnant with Bennett’s child.
The Greatest isn’t the first film which was made about coping with death and the loss of a loved one. The masterpiece in this genre is without any doubt Robert Redford’s Ordinary People ( 1980) which was about the disintegration of a middle class American family after the accidental death of the eldest son in a boating accident. There are similarities in both the films, for example when Grace wishes aloud that Rose was the one who died which is exactly what Mary Tyler Moore character tells her already fragile son who survived the boating accident. The mothers in both these films are understandably upset and grieving, but they display cruel and selfish behaviour which makes them detestable at times.
The nice point of The Greatest is that Rose has absolutely nothing wrong with her. She is a good student on a full scholarship to college, she isn’t some easy girl who has accumulated boyfriends nor is she a serial killer or a disturbed human being trying to seduce Allen or the younger brother! The scene when she explains to Allen how much and for how long she loved Bennett is extremely touching. Rose is not interested in getting money out of the Brewers and hangs up on her own mother when she suggests getting some cash out of them. Carey Mulligan is superb as the mature future teenage mum who just needs the steady presence of a family during her pregnancy only to discover that she has come into a completely dysfunctional set up.
The Greatest is also about your choice to grieve in a certain manner because everyone copes differently and no one is ever ready to say goodbye to the ones you love. Shana Feste’s writing and directorial debut was well received at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. There is nothing out of the ordinary in her filming style, nor in her script. But it is a well rounded film and a cinema professor would probably give it a 7/10, losing some points for its lack of creativity.
