Grief comes cloaked in as many forms as the tragedies that cause it. Almost all of them are on view in The Greatest, a somber, sensitively acted, intelligently penned, and sincerely directed film about the untimely death of a much-admired young man, the profound impact it has on his family, and the various ways the people who love him learn to express their mourning. The usual grumpy cynics will undoubtedly call it sentimental and manipulative. Ignore them. In spite of an unfortunate title that invites critical puns, The Greatest is cut from the same bolt of emotional genre fabric as the 1980 classic, Ordinary People—a rare bird among films because it is strong and filled with extraordinary human values that remain foreign to most hermetically sealed studio packages. The title refers to the boy who departs too soon, not to the movie itself, which may also depart too soon depending on box-office grosses, but not because it’s undeserving.
In the opening scene, two lovers on their way home from a date stop their car unwisely to declare unconditional affection, and in a shattering moment of smashing steel and grinding chrome, they’re broadsided by another vehicle. The boy is Bennett Brewer (Aaron Johnson), a teenage icon everybody calls “the greatest”, who dies in the wreckage, leaving behind a fractured Brewer family forced to deal with the same crisis in different ways. Grace, the unhinged mother (Susan Sarandon), slowly cracks up, Dad (Pierce Brosnan) is a brilliant math professor who hides his pain so successfully inside his heart that he stops sleeping, avoids any mention of loss, forgets how to balance a simple equation, and ends up in the hospital. Younger brother Ryan (charismatic newcomer Johnny Simmons), who both worshipped and resented Bennett’s place in the family structure, suffers from an inferiority that eventually drives him into rehab. Then, with the unexpected jolt of a knock on the door, Bennett’s 18-year-old girlfriend Rose, who survived the accident, arrives three months pregnant with no other place to go. Since Rose is played with earth-shaking truthfulness by the enchanting Carey Mulligan (Oscar-nominated for An Education), a multiple-choice menu of three-generational healing choices turns the Brewer family inside out, and the film explores raw, warm, gentle, enraged and heart-rending conflicts that lead to valid human drama. While Rose struggles to win the family’s trust and love for their unborn grandchild, people sign her belly like a yearbook, the kid brother turns to drugs, the father learns the restorative value of openly sharing his pain with others, while Grace slavishly visits the driver of the other car (Michael Shannon) who is hauled away for previous crimes after he regains consciousness, and in an effort to turn her favorite son into a martyr, she ruins everyone else’s life, too. Some of their actions are tender, others are terrifying, all seem like genuine and credible steps towards redemption. Meanwhile, bring plenty of Kleenex and apologize to no one for the tears that are inevitable.
Susan Sarandon has traveled this road before, especially in the sucrose melodrama Moonlight Mile, where she played the novelist mother of a murdered girl whose fiancé (Jake Gyllenhaal) moved in and mysteriously cured her writer’s block when she embarked on a book about her dead daughter. (“Fuck the perfume, give me the warts!” she whooped in the final reel.) As a family drama about the death of a prodigal son, The Greatest falls, as I mentioned earlier, in the much more distinguished tradition of Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. A debut effort carefully written and directed by Shana Feste, it offers a nuanced diagnosis of people in both their goodness and imperfection, with a touching screenplay that focuses on the actual things people do and say in survival mode. This is not the kind of personal movie Hollywood knows how to make very often, and God knows it is not the kind of movie Hollywood ever knows how to sell. (Already they’re asking, “Does it have legs?”) It’s not Avatar, but in an equitable movie world, there should be something for everyone.
One caveat: If it’s true, as they say, that when one door closes, another door opens, I feel that perhaps in The Greatest too many doors open too fast in time to meet the deadline for a happy ending, but this is just a small hangnail compared to the manicured strengths of a film of maturity and courage that kept me consistently engaged. Quite an accomplishment, really, for a new filmmaker on her first date with a camera.
Don’t be misled by the title Leaves of Grass. Do not expect literacy, either. This stoner comedy has nothing whatsoever to do with Walt Whitman or poetry of any kind. It’s just another oblique backfire from Tim Blake Nelson, whose work as a writer and director in general wallows in a bog of mediocrity. In fairness, I admit I once admired his horror film The Grey Zone, a nightmarish black and white study of life and death in a Nazi concentration camp so relentlessly depressing that almost nobody liked it except me. But it’s been downhill from there.
At least this one features the consummate talents of the versatile Edward Norton. Ever watchable when it comes to acting, if not always reliable when it comes to picking scripts, he plays identical twins as different as a taco and a tornado. Bill Kincaid is a clean-cut, button-down Ivy League philosophy professor in Ralph Lauren Polo on his way to a teaching chair at Harvard. His brother Brady is a drawling, greasy-haired Smith Brothers cough drop box cover who has developed his own hydroponic growing system for farming the best marijuana crops in Oklahoma. Devoting his life to scholarly pursuits, shedding his Southern accent and redneck family roots (their grandfather was a bootlegger), and vowing to stay as far away as jet planes can fly from both his hillbilly brother and a crazy Mammy Yoakum mother right out of Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch (Susan Sarandon, again), Bill is reluctantly lured back home to Little Dixie, Oklahoma for the first time in 12 years to briefly attend Brady’s funeral on the false pretense that his brother has been murdered. But Holy Hog Slop, as Walter Brennan used to say, Mom has checked herself into a rest home and Brady, it seems, has faked his own death and hatched a lethal plan to wipe out a vicious drug dealer and synagogue leader with the unlikely name Pug Rothbaum (a colorful Richard Dreyfuss) that requires him to be in two places at once. This forces Bill to play along, pretending to be his own brother while Brady pulls off the crime in another town (Mr. Norton plays both roles). Facing a scandal and prison sentence that could destroy his academic career, Bill is struck by the realization that nothing he learned in his philosophy texts can get him out of this mess and back to the lecture halls of Cambridge. The film’s biggest flaw: if he’s a professor of logic, how could he be so dumb?
Despite the implausible plot and a series of snafus that almost doom them both, a smidgen of interest grows as Bill and Brady are reunited, an oddball chemistry builds, and Bill’s orderly life unravels. But director Nelson, a cornball actor at best, is over the top as a larcenous Pa Kettle of a redneck sidekick and Keri Russell is totally wasted as a love interest for Bill that seems like an afterthought. She’s the one who quotes Walt Whitman “because it has no rhyme or meter”, while she’s gutting a 40-pound catfish. Mr. Nelson, a native of Tulsa, tries to bring some homespun snuff-spitting Tobacco Road ambience to the Oklahoma hick-town settings, but aside from the frenetic pacing and the fascination of watching the skillful Edward Norton juggle too very different dual roles simultaneously, there isn’t much fun or originality to be experienced here. The film also contains some shocking, blood-splattering violence that seems grimly at odds with the rest of its comic style. The mirror has two faces idea is nothing new. From Bette Davis in Dead Ringer to Sam Rockwell in Moon, dozens of seasoned actors have lit each other’s cigarettes while the audience thinks it is seeing double in much better pictures than this one. In Leaves of Grass, it seems irrelevant and recycled—essentially nothing more than a gimmick that wears out fast.
Thomas Haden Church, a pleasant performer of supporting-actor status in clunkers like Tales From the Crypt and George of the Jungle whose career got a temporary vitamin injection with the 2004 hit Sideways, stars in the title role in Don McKay, a ludicrously pretentious train wreck masquerading as a movie. He plays a loser working as a janitor in a Boston high school who goes back to his hometown for the first time in 25 years to visit his old 1983 yearbook sweetheart named Sonny (Elisabeth Shue). Sonny is supposed to be dying of the mysterious Ali MacGraw disease from Love Story, but the first indication that something in rotting in Denmark is that although Ms. Shue is a good actress, she’s much too healthy, sexy, and zahftig to look terminally ill. Leaping and prancing barefoot through the house in skin-tight satin lingerie, Ms. Shue looks healthy as a thoroughbred quarter horse at Hialeah. Suddenly announcing “I want to spend the rest of my very short life with you”, she takes the celibate, stricken Don to bed, ignoring the evil Marie (Melissa Leo), her stern live-in nurse in three-piece Jackie Kennedy suits, and the strange, possessive Dr. Pryce (James Rebhorn), who cautions her that too much exertion could be fatal. Everyone speaks in the hushed monotone of an oven timer, but just when you think the movie is dead, the doctor attacks Don, who kills him in self-defense with a piece of broken milk bottle and buries his blood-soaked body in the back yard. A few minutes later, Don wakes up in the hospital after an allergic bee sting and Sonny asks him to marry her. Back at home, the photos of Sonny’s ex-husband have been scissored out of every frame in the house, but Don discovers the missing pictures are really of the murdered doctor, whose body has disappeared. Unable to sleep (unlike the audience, which is now snoring), Don starts getting phone calls from the corpse.
What is going on here? Is Sonny really sick? Is the doctor really dead? Is everybody pretending to be somebody other than who they say they really are? And what’s Sonny hiding in the meat locker on the porch? Finally, you begin to question every character’s sanity when uptight Marie strips off her mall suits to reveal a body covered with tattoos, a local taxi driver recognizes Don as a mental case who left town in shame after murdering the real Sonny decades earlier, and two people get beaten to death with a frozen pot roast.
A study in ineptitude, writer-director Jake Goldberger proves that even a mercifully brief 87-minute running time can not be sustained by weirdness alone. Don McKay is labeled a thriller, but it’s such a contrived, club-footed confusion that it comes off more like a surreal comedy with too much air-conditioned Technicolor to even be correctly called a black one. The direction is a discourse in how to administer anesthesia. The overwrought, drug-addled situations are supposed to be gruesome, but they’re actually just plain silly. The stylized dialogue is unspeakable, which might explain why Mr. Church plays the entire film with hollow eyes and a permanent scowl, occasionally curling his lip to a 90-degree angle, his voice never rising above the kind of detached mumble only a dog can hear. It’s a queer and relentlessly unsettling performance, nearly as catatonic as everything around it, in a movie so lacking in cogent reasoning it seems to have been made in a secret code.
Benjamin Bratt has come a long way since “Law and Order”. Graduating from stupid gossip column fodder as one of Julia Roberts’ many boyfriends to distinguished roles in Pinero and Traffic, he has carved a distinguished career as an actor of integrity and vision. No achievement has been more honest, passionate or remarkable than his first starring role for the new production company he has formed with his brother Peter, a talented new director who is going places. The movie is called La Mission and it is well worth seeing for a variety of reasons, all of them striking, poignant, and memorable.
Set in the colorful Mission District in San Francisco in which the Bratts grew up (Peter still lives there; Benjamin has moved to a duller but
more upscale sign of movie-star arrival in Hollywood), La Mission focuses on a rigid Latino symbol of old world machismo named Che Rivera, played with so much testosterone by Mr. Bratt that even his painted-on tattoos threaten to jump right off his abs and kick you in the groin. Che is an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who works as a San Francisco bus driver with a special talent for making over low riding Chevy convertibles equipped with hydraulic lifts, modified suspensions and V-8 engines with elaborately painted symbols of Catholic saints on their trunks. Che’s gaudy, elaborately decorated lowriders are so famous in the Mission that they form annual parades. Everybody respects Che for his tough-guy street smarts and fears him for his violent temper. Amid the African drums, Brazilian sambas, Buddhist chants and Mexican tacquerias that make the Mission a mecca of immigrant culture, Che is an icon.
But Che has a problem no man of muscle and steel can easily survive. Che’s only son Jes, whom he raised from a baby and practically worships with a pride he’s too embarrassed to show, harbors a secret he’s afraid to tell his father. Jes (the handsome and excellent Jeremy Ray Valdez) is gay. Worse still, he’s in love with a white boy and is a habitual customer in the Castro’s gay bars. Never mind that Jes is smart, kind, warm, humane, and the first ethnic product of the neighborhood to win a scholarship to UCLA. A homosexual son goes against every tradition Che believes in. Believing God is getting revenge for all the bad things he’s done by giving him a “defective”, Che beats up his son, throws him out of the house, and loses the only thing he loves. His tough poker-playing pals from the hood tells him they couldn’t care less. Che retorts that if it was their son, they’d feel the same kind of shame and disgust. The same problems of gay sons facing the pain of coming out to macho fathers with blinders on exist in Latino families just as they do in other cultures. But to Che, the shock and disappointment is symbolic of even greater change—the way nothing in his once Catholic neighborhood is the same. The Mission has become a gumbo of graffiti, designer boutiques, and singles bars. The more it evolves, the more Che denounces the word “progress”. Now gentrification has arrived at his own doorstep, and rage is reaching the point of self-destruction.
There’s something touching about watching this estranged father-son relationship struggle to find newfound mutual compassion. These are the kinds of polarized blacks and Hispanics who turned out in record percentages to vote for Obama and against the legalization of gay marriage in the state of California. Now change is in their face whether they like it or not. When Jes becomes the innocent victim of homophobic aggression from one of his own people, Che is forced to examine the shadows of his own heart. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to smash the pomegranate red Impala he’s been working on for his son’s graduation, which he refuses to attend.
The Mission, carefully directed by Peter Bratt and beautifully photographed by award-winning cinematographer Hiro Narita (Never Cry Wolf), explores the human side of a culture we know almost nothing about, in a world usually exploited on film for drugs and danger. This one emphasizes family and traditions instead of poverty and gang wars. I won’t give away the wrenching final scene, or reveal how everything turns out for the tortured people involved, but every aspect of their nature is meticulously illuminated , with Mr. Bratt giving an intense, multi-layered performance as a man who must learn there more to masculinity than a pair of fists. Observing the phases both father and son endure while they try to forgive and prioritize in order to survive makes The Mission a poignant and unusual film you won’t soon forget.