First Hit: This film is about grief and has some wonderful moments but it is overly melodramatic and manipulative.
I’m not sure why Carey Mulligan strives to play a teenager when she is clearly not one. Once again, just as in “An Education”, her age and maturity level are out of line with the part. That doesn’t make her a bad actress, in fact she’s rather good but she cannot play teenage parts.
Here she plays Rose, a high school senior, who passes the same boy, Bennett (played by Aaron Johnson), every day as they each leave school. For four years they’ve passed each other in the hallway always timing it so that they meet each other but don't speak.
It is the last day of their senior year at school and this time as they pass he speaks to her. As they both suspect, they are immediately attracted to each other and end up going off somewhere to make love.
While driving back; he stupidly (naive urgency) stops in the middle of the road because he wants to tell her he loves her. Just as the words come out of his mouth, their car is hit by a truck and he dies, almost immediately (this is an important point). She lives and is able to make it to the funeral and there we see the pain of Bennett's family. Susan Sarandon plays Grace his mother and she is clearly devastated.
Pierce Brosnan plays Allen his father who is stoic, holding things together but clearly not processing his grief. And, then there is his younger brother Ryan (played by Johnny Simmons), who is struggling with his loss through mind numbing drugs.
All of this happens before film name credit awkwardly hits the screen on Brosnan's chest. The name comes from what Rose told him about his first time as a lover and what his parents think of him, “he was the greatest”.
This film is set up for boo hooing and tears. There are scenes that really work, like dinner the first night Rose comes to stay with them because she is pregnant with Bennett’s child.
Mulligan, as I said is too old for her part and although she does a fine job, I think it would have been better if she were a college senior and not a high school senior, but then again the story would have had to change as well. Sarandon is not very real to me in her expression of grief. It feels a bit contrived, forced and over manipulative. Brosnan, at times, is extraordinary in his role. I actually felt the pressure cooking within him as he attempted to hold himself and his family together as his grief slowly envelops him. Simmons is rather good as the younger brother who is struggling to deal with his own sadness as well as being the son who wasn’t “The Greatest” but is the only one left.
Overall: The film feels manipulative in the way scenes and dialogue are set up to make you feel something. I’d rather have an honest story be told in a real way and let me find my feelings rather than be manipulated into having a feeling.