A love story centering on the connection between music and memory and how they transport us, sometimes literally.
The central idea of writer/director Ned Benson’s “The Greatest Hits” is, in theory, intriguing. The protagonist of the film’s story is a young woman whose life has already been pockmarked by the tragedy of losing the man she loved, and as that story begins, she is in the throes of grief and something far less explicable. Certain music, it seems, can transport her consciousness back in time, for the duration of the song in question, to when she first heard it during her doomed romance. Music does have this ability in real life, of course, depending on certain circumstances, but Benson takes it literally here, in a loaded scenario that unfortunately cannot be sustained by the treatment it has been given.
One performance does nearly help in this regard, although it’s telling that that performance is not the one given by Lucy Boynton as the protagonist, Harriet. Make no mistake that Boynton, a talented actress who has yet to receive a true breakout role, is solid here, especially in the moments of grief that define Harriet. But this character is more or less a narrative device for Benson, who establishes rules around her ability to be transported through time, only to build all that up toward a third act that makes little sense. The actress’s innate abilities cannot get us over that significant leap in logic and sensibility, which means that the other important character here and the actor playing him is on hand to elevate the material however he can.
That would be Justin H. Min, another actor whose recent work has suggested what this film can say quite loudly about his own innate abilities. Min plays David as more than simply the love interest in a romantic drama. He has his own feelings, fears, and desires and a history that the actor communicates so beautifully it’s tempting to forgive the movie around him as its initial promise gives away to a lot of silly solemnity. The two Meet Cute after the traumatic event led to Harriet’s strange new reaction to the music in her omnipresent, noise-canceling headphones, and sweet chemistry between the actors and characters develops and remains, even through the peculiar turns in its climax.
It would be criminal to reveal anything about where this story ends up, of course, but the important context is that Harriet has lost Max (David Corenswet), with whom she fell in love at first sight, and gained David, seemingly through the mysterious, cosmic accidents of the universe. Now, anytime she listens to certain songs, she enters a near-hallucinatory memory state, recognizable as a fit of some sort to those around her, and “visits” her old self while being fully conscious of the sensation. These, at least, are the rules established by Benson’s screenplay, but by the time the filmmaker has decided to address a variety of emotional issues within the lives of these characters, he has also established a desire to see this central romance through (not least because of the actors’ chemistry).
Ultimately, the experiment becomes too strained and false to sustain the romance or its meaning. Curiously, the music in “The Greatest Hits” is always just out of reach (likely a way to avoid certain legal obligations), and that, more than anything else here, sums up the experience of watching it. We acknowledge a loaded scenario with much promise, and then the movie proceeds to do much less than it promises.
Now Playing at AMC Stonebriar in Frisco and then streaming on Hulu Friday, April 12th
