Ten years ago, writer/director Ned Benson pieced together three films called The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, an ambitious relationship drama with two of the films showing a couple’s experiences from each of their points of view (the third film was a more traditional telling of the story, forced upon the filmmaker by his distributor). Now with The Greatest Hits, Benson gives us a grieving woman named Harriet (Lucy Boynton, of Sing Street and Bohemian Rhapsody) who discovers that certain songs transport her back in time briefly (for the duration of the song). Specifically, she is transported to the exact moment in her and her late boyfriend’s life where said song became something important to them. She relives the past and can actually alter the future if she changes anything, which she attempts to do by trying to convince her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet, set to be the new Superman for James Gunn) to do something different that won’t lead to the car accident that killed him, but it never seems to work.
It’s a loaded concept that sounds more complicated and corny than it needs to be, but in fact, the filmmaker treats things seriously and turns the film into an examination of someone unable to let go of their grief. Because these moments of time travel might happen while she’s in the middle of shopping or driving, she wears headphones playing only music that she has cleared as not triggering these episodes. Her music tests are rigorous and kind of fascinating, as she pulls a new record from her collection, plays it through while she’s safely sitting in a comfy chair, and sees what happens.
About two years after the accident, Harriet decides to go to a support group for people who can’t get past losing a loved one (run by a doctor played by Retta), and she meets David (Justin H. Min, from After Yang, Beef), who turns out to be a hell of a guy, so much so that she confides in him her time-traveling abilities, which she proves to him by going back to a moment when her life and his intersected one other time and leaving something there for him to find. While all of this is going on, the two of them are falling in love, and while he wants her to be successful in escaping her time-jumping music cycle, he also understands how someone’s grief can fuel such an obsession (remember where they met).
Both of them have supportive friends and family, including Harriet’s best friend Morris (Austin Crute), a DJ; and David’s sister, who is the only person that understands the thing he is missing, their parents—but in the end, they must rely on each other to decide what Harriet’s final act must be, and how one option is to save Max’s life but never get to build a life with him.
As someone that essentially needs music playing to provide the soundtrack to my life at all times, I could identify with this idea that music and memory are immeasurably intertwined, even if there’s no time travel involved. Boynton is a gifted actor and something of a chameleon within her career, but The Greatest Hitsthreatens to bring her into the mainstream. She’s the glue that holds this elevated concept of a movie together, and she does it by making it possible to see her pain at all times, even when she’s falling for a new significant other. The logic of both the “science” and how this time travel works exactly left me a bit frustrated, but Boynton is such a force as Harriet, I mostly set aside my brain and let this one happen to me.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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