Will
someone please stop Susan Sarandon from playing grief-stricken mothers
before this once-great actress becomes a one-trick caricature of her
former self? Having fretted over a son feared missing in Desert Storm
in Safe Passage, mourned the death of her son's fiancée in Moonlight Mile and most recently grieved for a son killed upon returning from Iraq in In the Valley of Elah, Sarandon makes it a four-peat with director Shana Feste's dubiously titled Sundance competition entry The Greatest,
in which her 18-year-old son dies (by his own stupid fault) in a car
crash and his surviving girlfriend (newcomer Carey Mulligan)
subsequently announces that she's pregnant. Seemingly included by the
festival only because of its shameless plagiarism of Sundance founder
Robert Redford's Ordinary People, The Greatest is a
mourning-family turkey with all the trimmings: a father (Pierce
Brosnan) who can't bring himself to grieve; a mother who refuses to
alter so much as one dust mite in the dead boy's room; a
recovering-addict brother (Johnny Simmons) forever in the shadow of his
golden-boy sibling; and an incessant love-songs-with-Delilah soundtrack
meant to wring tears from even the stoniest of viewers. No movie at
Sundance this year has depressed me more — not because of the story it
tells, but because of the creative bankruptcy it embodies.
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