THE GREATEST

What starts out as possibly the worst "night I lost my virginity" scenario, like, EVER, turns into a curiously unsatisfying story of one family trying to move beyond grief.

The film opens with two teens making cute eyes at each other, then making sweet love... the first time for both. Later, as the boy drives the girl home, he stops the car in the middle of the dark road to profess his love to her, and BAM! their car gets hit by another, and the boy is killed. I am not giving anything away, as this is the set-up for the whole film, and it is literally the first five minutes of the movie.

There's a funeral. And there is an impressive long, single-take shot of the boy's stunned family sitting blank-faced in the back of the limo, completely distant from each other in their own thoughts. Dad Allen (Pierce Brosnan) ends up shutting down in his grief, while mother Grace (Susan Sarandon) becomes more and more unhinged, unable to deal with it all. Teen brother Ryan (Johnny Simmons), the bad son, takes drugs to escape. None of them are handling it well.

Then one day, an unexpected guest shows up at the door, a girl named Rose (Carey Mulligan, who is SO cute), a girl that Allen remembers seeing at the funeral. She doesn't know the family at all, nor they her. But boy is it awkward when she explains that she is three months pregnant with their dead son's baby, and she has nowhere else to go. Rose moves in with the dead boy's family. The repressed emotions and grief continues to fester.

And there you have the rest of the movie, predicting when each of the characters will finally blow their top and/or have Their Scene. The acting is all-around very good—for instance, I found myself surprisingly impressed by Pierce Brosnan's performance, as he tries to stay strong and share his sadness with his wife, who has gone so far off the deep end that he can't reach her. And Carey Mulligan, who is the newest actress that I adore, manages to fill in some character depth where there was none written for her.

And that is the curious problem with The Greatest (which refers, by the way, to how everyone viewed the dead son... he was a good kid, simply "the greatest"). The actors seem game to act the hell out of this movie, but the script leaves them hanging with too many questions. Like how can they know so little about Rose after she has been living with them for six months? I mean, even if you only share a kitchen, you still know the quirks of your roommates, whether you want to or not. And why does Grace never question Rose for answers about the accident, like she questions the driver of the truck that him the kids, who is in a coma? And Ryan attends teen grief counseling, which should be interesting, but it serves only as a plot point, it seems, to produce a love interest for him. And even though Rose didn't know the dead boy well at all, with his mother wanting to talk about him all the time, you think she would've picked up some basic info after living with the family.

It's too bad that the script and story of The Greatest is wanting. From seeing the cast do what they could with what they were given, I'm convinced that they would do an excellent job if they had a much better movie to work with.

DVD NOTES

The DVD release of The Greatest includes interviews with director Shana Feste, as well as with cast members Carey Mulligan, Pierce Brosnan, and Johnny Simmons, plus Deleted Scenes and the movie's trailer.