Time travel romance rings in my ears and I am like what? Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to craft good stories around love-struck adults, or better yet let the time travel trope rest in peace. Though it ultimately suffers from a screenplay that simply quits on its own concepts, writer-director Ned Benson’s ‘The Greatest Hits’ discovers an originality in setting where the main character is a young woman who can travel to particular incidents of her past relationship by concentrating on that moment’s background music.
A talented Lucy Boynton plays Harriet, a woman who is depressed because of the loss of her boyfriend Max, who is featured as a dull David Corenswet. Maybe due to the constant pain and grief, she sometimes manages to save herself by reliving his last days. Moving forward to two years after the car accident that took her boyfriend’s life, whenever she hears a certain song, she time-travels to the moment’ s day but knows that she is merely a spectator. Harriet attempts her utmost to alter the past while living in those earlier days. As she continually begs him to go a different way, Max goes along with that request only to die later. No matter how much effort Harriet makes in her imaginary time travel, she cannot bring back her boyfriend.
To her defense, Harriet’s best friend Morris’ portrayal by a nice Austin Crute tries to get Harriet back to the real world, reminding her about the negativity that comes with a constant loss. Despite the cliches surrounding the role of the ‘gay best friend’ in Hollywood romance, Cruet manages to play the character of humor in a romantic setting very eloquently.
It’s quite interesting that in the movie she never looks back to her painful past, and is already dealing with David (Justin H. Min, in the film Asher), a kind man she meets at a support group and he also happens to be grieving the loss of his parents. They develop feelings for each other, and it is evident that David is a kind and gentle person who appreciates Harriet’s eccentricities (she wears headphones when she sees a familiar song screaming at her from the past). Min’s performance here is so instinctively captivating that he holds the feelings within limits within the overall drama, which concerns time travel.
Music can deeply touch one’s feelings, and the beginning of Ned Benson’s L.A. love story has some decent ideas that are bound to make the screenplay more intriguing. Sadly, most of the interactions between the characters appear far too scripted, while the director does not manage to bring anything new to the existing portrayal of pain and the human psyche. Concerning Benson’s directing style it is rather efficacious, however, no chronology of events is present in his screenplay. Support group of Harriet and David is commonplace, and Harriet’s scenes with Max hold no rationale for their love towards each other. David Corenswet epitomizes the word dull and brings absolutely nothing in the part except to do nothing in every scene, and pose constantly with his head over Boynton’s Harriet. Benson fails to present their relationship in a manner so that it looks appealing to the audience and thus adds value to the story.
As for the songs selected for the film, there is no logic or order in them. The selected pieces do not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting any pop song out of here. The film does not assign them any particular significance, except perhaps, that on this particular day it was just the tracks played somewhere in the background.
For all the exciting possibilities that a time travel movie should present to a filmmaker, ‘The Greatest Hits’ looks too ordinary. Cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung has established a superb visual style but has not been giddy enough to delve into Benson’s writing. The director’s inability to dig any deeper makes this a rather tame love story for young adults.
This one is in the cinematic wasteland, which not even two really good lead performances can save from.
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