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The Greatest Hits is a Great Blunder

A few years ago, I reviewed Richard Curtis’s About Time -a movie I found to be severely underrated in how it used a time travel conceit to both explore romantic fantasy and poignantly comment on the passage of time, loss, and living in the moment. Yes, its time travel mechanics didn’t make sense if you thought about them for more than a few minutes, but it didn’t matter because of how endearingly it was used. About Time has found something of a cousin now in The Greatest Hits, which also aspires to use time travel as a means of facilitating both charming romance and humanist commentary. It mostly succeeds at the former, but in spite of some good intentions fumbles the latter quite miserably.
The second feature from director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits endeavours to highlight the intimate relationship between music and memory. Its protagonist Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a keen music aficionado, has been in a depressed spiral for a few years since the tragic death of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a car accident; and her emotional recovery has been hindered by a phenomenon in which hearing songs connected to one of her memories with Max has the power to literally transport her back to that moment for the duration of the song. Leaving not enough time for her to make a difference, she habitually dwells in the comfort of these temporary time travels, but her psychological state as well as a promising new relationship demand she find a way of letting them go.
Though a bit laboured, it is a compelling conceit for a movie like this. I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie, not even by John Carney, that has tapped into the unique power of personal association a song could have. And Benson does a very good job of selling that sincerely, as he portrays Harriet’s solitary zone in her home, an atmospheric attic where she can turn up the speakers, lie back with her headphones, and be taken to a loving moment with Max. The romance of music is also felt, divorced from the pain of loss, in bits throughout the movie pinpointing her new relationship with David (Justin H. Min), and the foundations of new emotive memories. There are some really wonderful illustrations of this, like in the two of them singing along to Nelly Furtado (who incidentally shows up in the movie as well) in the car, or more atmospherically dancing together at a rooftop club to their own music through headphones.
It feels a bit of a cheat honestly to cut past characterization or the believable development of their romance -neither character is especially originally fleshed out. But Boynton and Min are both quite charming and have a nice chemistry, even as the movie dips into its fair share of romantic and fantasy cliché (there is of course a moment where Harriet shares her secret with David and he doesn’t believe her, causing a temporary rift in their relationship). In any case, they are more strongly defined than Corenswet -who gets the short end of the stick in this movie on multiple fronts- and Austin Crute as Harriet's gay stereotype friend Morris. In fact, in spite of the extravagant material, Boynton plays Harriet's trauma and personal conflict very authentically. The profound loss translates, makes her rash choices resonate. Through her and the uniqueness of her power, the movie appears to engage sincerely with its theme on tragedy and moving on with life while keeping the memories close.
But then unexpectedly that core tenet is thrown out. For about seventy-five per cent of its runtime, The Greatest Hits extolls the power of memory and music, in both positive and negative connotations. Sure, Harriet is boxed in by the past and the allure of those memories with Max, but they are also clearly incredibly special, and a way of keeping him alive. For whatever reason though, Benson makes an utterly baffling choice in the third act that deals with this problem in the most extreme way, really throwing a wrench in the movie’s overarching ethos and sending a discouraging message to its audience. Not only does it render Max as a character and the weight of his impact on Harriet as inherently worthless, it takes that relationship between music and memory and casts it as a constricting thing -something that must be overcome and eliminated. Does Benson actually care about the power of music? The movie in this leap takes itself too literally without considering what effect that has on its far more significant figurative meaning. What ultimately comes out of it is a statement on how the pain of loss is not worth the relationship it is attached to, that good memories should be forgotten because of the taint, and that a love story is invalid if it ends in tragedy. The film attempts to coat it in the promise of a new romance and tepid stakes around it not manifesting at all, but it can’t get away from how blatantly wrong its whole endgame is. I struggle to understand what Benson was thinking by going this route!
Further, a movie called The Greatest Hits probably ought to fill itself out with more hits. For espousing so strongly the profound connection between people and music, its usage of songs is underwhelming. There is a fine, moody score to the piece by Ryan Lott of the band Son Lux which did the music for Everything Everywhere All at Once, but the best needle-drops it can come up with (besdies that one from Furtado) are “Say Yes to Heaven” by Lana Del Ray and “This is the Day” by The The. None of the other artists on the soundtrack are recognizable to me. And that doesn’t mean they’re bad songs (though several are generic) or less worthy of inclusion here -I love when a movie can spotlight a great indie band. But this is the kind of movie that demands a certain heft in its musical choices -one frankly beyond the reach of a little indie film made for Hulu.
But there is a lot this movie could have been capable of -and some that it does admittedly communicate through earnest chemistry and a resonant depiction of both the way tragedy can cling to a person and the highly personalized escapism that music can provide. But the goodwill earned there is pretty heavily sapped by the egregious dramatic choices of the film’s last act. About Time made something of a gear-shift turn itself, but it was one that enriched what was already there instead of actively contradicting what appeared to be its precepts. And that is directly what most prevents this movie from being a great hit.

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