The Greatest

Directed by Shana Feste

(R)

**

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This family drama “withers and dies under the long shadow” of Ordinary People, said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. It may be unfair to compare writer-director Shana Feste’s debut to Robert Redford’s 1980 Oscar winner, but it’s unavoidable. Ordinary People was a poignant study of characters and how they processed death, said Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. That’s what The Greatest would like to be, too. Hours after losing his virginity, a teenager (Aaron Johnson) dies in a car accident. Three months later, his girlfriend (Carey Mulligan) shows up at his family’s door, pregnant and alone. Feste’s film, however, lacks the “connective tissue” that could have not only tied these wounded characters together but deepened the “profundity of their plight.” Buried 12-feet-deep in clichés, The Greatest never develops beyond its initial premise. Still, this “uneven but often affecting” film certainly has its heart in the right place, said Chuck Wilson in The Village Voice. Its gifted cast—which includes Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan as the parents and Johnny Simmons as the self-destructive younger brother—“find moments of real emotion.”