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For the most part, THE GREATEST is a Lifetime movie masquerading as an indie drama. The film wastes tons of opportunities to move into deeper/darker emotional waters, and worst of all, it rushes into a haphazard, unrealistic ending that ties everything up nicely in a horribly unconvincing way. The simple-mindedness of this script is completely incompatible with the strength of the performances given here. Something just doesn't fit.
There's no doubt that a family's grief over losing one of its members is a perfect vehicle to explore in a drama... but not so when the approach is to simply skirt the surface of it rather than get knee-deep into the characters' demons. Predictably, Susan Sarandon does a wonderful job as a grieving mother who has lost her son, but that's until she's forced to embarrass herself during the film's final 15 minutes, when her character suffers one of the hardest-to-believe changes of heart you'll ever witness in a movie.
As bad as the film's title is at giving you an idea of its quality level, if there are two great things to be found in THE GREATEST, their names are Carey Mulligan and Johnny Simmons. The former scored an Oscar nomination last year for her charming work in AN EDUCATION, while the latter was (once again) one of the few good things of two lame movies that were released last year that I saw (namely, HOTEL FOR DOGS and JENNIFER'S BODY). Despite the strength of these two actors' performances, both are severely hampered by what the story gives them to work with.
Mulligan's Rose can never become a three-dimensional character because all we discover about her is related to her interaction with a character who is now dead, and the film hardly goes to any lengths to treat her as more of an individual. Similarly, a very interesting plot line seems to emerge with Simmons' character, Ryan, who has addiction problems and connects with one of the girls in the support group he joins... but shock of all shocks, both of those things are left hanging. Ryan's relationship with the girl ends when one of those twists we've seen a dozen times in movies happens, but to make matters worse, we see nothing more about that. All of this gives me the sneaking suspicion that certain scenes were cut out in order to avoid some more disturbing subject matters (which would've made this an infinitely better piece of dramatic filmmaking). The film rushes so much into its wholly artificial ending, and in doing so, it does an injustice to both Rose and Ryan by never allowing us to get to know them particularly well.
THE GREATEST is the type of film that features lines like "It should've been her that died!" That's not SO terrible, but it doesn't help when towards the end, we also have to hear "He loved her, didn't he?" This is the type of movie that should make audiences cry, not cringe. The solution is simple: get these four actors back together and give them the dark, unsanitized story that this type of material deserves and let them inhabit fully realized characters. Maybe the end result of that still wouldn't be the greatest, but it'd certainly be better than this. With all that said, though, there's no doubt in my mind that Mulligan and Simmons are excellent talents and I look forward to the better films they'll make in the next few years.
5/10
