Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.
Shana Feste’s The Greatest came to Sundance trailing a cloud of buzz, in part because of fest director Geoffrey Gilmore’s gushing description of the film in the festival guide. So imagine my surprise when the film turned out to be a variation on Ordinary People, only significantly less stylistically assured. (Fuck you. Redford’s film is stylistically assured.) Here, Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan play the parents of an 18-year-old boy killed in a horrific car accident during the film’s opening scene. When his girlfriend turns out to be pregnant and with nowhere to go, they bring her in to their family. Wackiness most certainly does not ensue.
To be fair, grief is always a hard subject to tackle onscreen, always carrying with it the slight whiff of exploitation, and Feste’s story appears to come from an honest place. The tone varies sharply, perhaps by design – the main conflict in the film is a strange war of attrition between Brosnan and Sarandon’s characters. She wants to indulge her pain to the fullest, wanting to know as much about her son’s final moments as possible. In her quest to do so, she finds the man who crashed into the car (Michael Shannon), who himself is comatose, and begins to nurture and read to him. (In what appears to be an awkward narrative oversight, the film never explains how Shannon’s character went from being fully conscious and active following the accident, even going so far as to walk over to the boy, give him his coat and – we later learn – talk to him, only to somehow wind up in a months-long coma.)
In truth, though, Sarandon has done the grieving mother role before – many, many times – and it’s hard not to think of films like Lorenzo’s Oil or Moonlight Mile or Safe Passage while watching her. That sense of familiarity with her performance works against the film’s attempts to convey the upheaval in its characters’ lives. No, it’s actually Brosnan who makes the film, and without him in it, I’m not sure I would have been able to take it at all seriously. As a math professor who finds obsessive comfort in numbers, the actor turns his preternatural cool into a weapon; his aloofness here comes not from confidence but from a deep, unsettling awkwardness. When he does finally break down, it’s painful and clumsy, and we want him to go back to holding it all in. But that seems to be partly the point. His presence here takes what might have been an agonizingly obvious drama of grief and threatens to turn it into something altogether more surprising.