Photosensitivity Warning: The visual elements used to convey transitions appear as an anamorphic lens-like flare similar to refraction of light that may prove trigging to photosensitive individuals.
Memory is greatly tied to our senses. Tastes, sights, smells, and sounds all can bring us back to a specific moment in our lives in a flash. Depending on the where and when, it can be resoundingly joyous or it can bring us to our knees. Writer/director Ned Benson (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them) utilizes this in his latest project, the sci-fi drama The Greatest Hits, which uses the connection between music and memory as a physical metaphor for the way grief can tether us to the past and the way intrusive thoughts drag us back to moments we long to heal from. Anchored by Lucy Boynton (Sing Street), The Greatest Hits is a beautiful story of loss and love that will break your heart and heal you over and over to the rhythmic sounds of sonic memory.
Lucy Boynton as Harriet in THE GREATEST HITS. Photo credit by Merie Weismiller Wallace. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
It’s been two years since the accident that put Harriet (Boynton) in a coma and killed her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet). While the rest of the world wants her to move on, to stop living in the past, only Harriet’s friend Morris (Austin Crute) believes her when she says that she can’t. It’s not because she doesn’t want to, but because she actually can’t as each time she hears a song with a memory tied to Max, her consciousness travels back to that moment in time. To complicate matters, she makes a connection with David (Justin H. Min), requiring her to decide if she wants to keep living with one foot in the past and one in the present or if she wants to move toward the future.
L-R: Lucy Boynton as Harriet and David Corenswet as Max in THE GREATEST HITS. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
We all make choices and often have no sense of the natural consequences that come from them. You go left and 20 years later you’re married with kids. You go right and 20 years later you’re divorced with no kids. Or anything else that infinite probabilities can devise. The trick is being able to live with the outcomes of the choices. Benson’s tale utilizes this as a driving force in Harriet’s life, making tangible the ability to revisit singular moments (at-will and not) in the story of her relationship with Max. To the outside world, Harriet looks like someone that can’t move on, when, in reality, it’s more like Harriet possesses survivor’s guilt and can’t move past that. In this way, the isolation that Harriet endures as a result of her condition isn’t because she can’t let go of Max, but because she can’t let go of the sense of responsibility as someone with the potential ability to save him. This is what shifts the tale as we see it on the surface into something deeper thanks to the resonant meaning.
Take Morris: the lone friend from college who, despite all the “trouble,” continues to support her. On the face of it, Morris is the expected rom-com best friend with the added trope of being both Black and gay. Morris is more or less defined by his relationship with Harriet and should, for all intents and purposes, not work as a defined character. Through the film, though, the audience is given clues (some obvious, some less so) that indicate the active choices Morris continually makes to engage in friendship with someone who is far more complicated than before and whose life is significantly different as a result of that caretaker responsibility. The obvious stuff is how Morris — a DJ — plays music designated as “safe” when Harriet is around so that she can remove her auditory blockers/distractors and reengage with the world around her without concern over time travel. He doesn’t have to do this, yet continually makes the active choice to provide a haven for Harriet. If not for the very multicultural cast whose representation is not strictly connected to their race, the characterization of Morris could remain a trope, yet, bolstered by Crute’s performance and the subtext, the character is presented as an active participant rather than merely a supporting player. Similarly, though less detailed so as to leave some secrets to discover, the presentation of Harriet could easily be withdrawn or persistently morose, which would track with the initial presumption of who Harriet is; however, between Boynton’s performance and the clues we’re given, we come to learn that Harriet isn’t so much stuck in the past as forcibly drawn to it, unable to escape, making herself trapped in a recurring loop that she longs to escape while still finding herself holding on tightly to it because of her love of Max and the ability the transportation allows to exist within a world in which his heart still beats. This is a surprising push-pull that is fascinating all on its own and is made even more compelling when Benson introduces David (played with delicacy by Min (After Yang; Shortcomings)) as a potential love interest.
L-R: Justin H. Min as David and Lucy Boynton as Harriet in THE GREATEST HITS. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Then, there’s the musical component. The Greatest Hits doesn’t have musical sequences in the vein of recent releases like Wonka (2023) which find its cast members breaking out into song that the rest of the people around them see without the music or imaginative choreography. What it does have is a rhythmic heart that beats throughout the film. Music possesses the power to ground people in a moment in time and the songs throughout are like time capsules that we’re invited to peer into. This is what makes Benson’s title a bit of a wink as it plays as both a nod to the music industry and to the ways in which people describe moments of their lives when trying to provide a shorthand. In this way, the songs are the shorthand of the relationship between Max and Harriet. Films that utilize specific songs often do so for their lyrical or thematic meaning (see: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (2014; 2017) as excellent examples of the soundtrack being inextricably linked to the narrative arc and themes within). Here, it’s not about what the songs themselves represent, but the moments that they are tied to. In a non-spoiler example, allow me to discuss the 2001 song “Drops of Jupiter” by Train. That song played on MTV during a particularly complex period in my life and it came on MTV frequently, a channel I’d leave on when I couldn’t sleep in college. As such, when that song comes on now, I tend to find myself remembering that moment in the dorm and the feelings that are connected to it. Recently, my youngest has taken to listening to the song (introduced by his mother) and now I’m shifting the connection in my memory to rocking him down for sleep, a much happier and healthy resonant memory. The point is that the soundtrack is remarkable with songs by Nelly Furtado, Beach House, Roxy Music, Neil Frances, Jamie XX featuring Romy, and Phoebe Bridgers, making up moments big and small, which will undoubtedly delight music fans while also surprisingly not directing how one should feel in any specific scene or sequence.
Lucy Boynton as Harriet in THE GREATEST HITS. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
At the top of this review is a photosensitivity warning and you should take heed if you are someone who finds themselves triggered by light. Smartly, Benson utilizes several consistent visual motifs and actions leading to them so that the audience can protect themselves before they occur. When travel is triggered purposefully, the needle of a record player starts to glow yellow where it connects with the wax of the vinyl before flares appear around Harriet and then multiply. When not time traveling on purpose, Boynton’s performance gives the audience enough time to recognize that she’s about to travel before the flares appear, thereby offering audiences ample time to cover themselves. Thanks to a clever narrative structure, the audience learns quickly when transport happens and how so that there’s little chance of being surprised by it. But this isn’t the only trick that The Greatest Hits employs in its visual effects as the version of Harriet who time travels is also given a bit of a flare, bits of color coming off of her like static, helping to separate the Harriet of now with the version of her then. It’s a smart way to continually indicate that Harriet is out of sync with herself in the past, thereby supporting the notion that her travels are unnatural and unwanted.
Filmmaker Ned Benson. Photo Credit: Niall O’Brien. Photo courtesy of SXSW.
The whole of The Greatest Hits is surprisingly thematically rich wherein someone could write an essay just about Harriet’s survivor’s guilt, Morris’s active choices and the reverberations through his own life, and the way in which people treat individuals with mental disorders or extensive trauma. The Greatest Hits even exists as an allegory for the way that individuals with severe illness are often ostracized and alienated by their support systems, something even more noticeable since the pandemic began. So many essays could be written and should be written by those with the space/opportunity to do so. All that said, though it may not sound like it, Benson’s The Greatest Hits is a rom-com — it’s just told through a less upbeat or light lens. There’s a delightful double meet-cute, a charming exploration of a budding romance that acknowledges the complications of love after loss, and a conflict resolution that not only pulls off the very high wire act the narrative requires but does so without undermining the work leading toward it. Because we’re dealing with time travel and romance, especially using the vehicle of grief as the catalyst and continued pressure point for Harriet, one may presume that there’s no levity or sense of hope, yet that’s what courses through The Greatest Hits from start to finish: hope. Hope for a new day, for release from the past, and for a fresh tomorrow, all to the rhythm of the songs that make up our everyday lives through the choices we make.
Screening during SXSW 2024.
In theaters April 5th, 2024.
Available on Hulu April 12th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official SXSW The Greatest Hits webpage.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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