The Greatest Hits: If She Could Only Just Begun to Turn, Turn, Turn Back Time

Harriet (Lucy Boynton) finds art imitating life when she discovers certain songs can transport her back in time — literally. While she relives the past through romantic memories of her former boyfriend (David Corenswet), her time traveling collides with a burgeoning new love interest in the present (Justin H. Min). As she takes her journey through the hypnotic connection between music and memory, she wonders — even if she could change the past, should she?

REVIEW:

I like how The Grestest Hits literalizes heartache, how it takes that breakup song or any song from a past relationship and turns it into a time travel vehicle to grief, and in the end, recovery and moving on. I like how it shows that once memory gets attached that music can be both tombstone and relic. And how that can lead to the loop of hiding out in one’s grief.

This is what happening to Harriet (Lucy Boynton), whose boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) died in a car accident two years before. She’s in that Groundhog Day loop of trying to find that one thing she could have done that would have saved him and her from the pain that she exists in. Any song she hears associated with Max literally transport her back to that time with him. In reality, she passes out, so she wears noise cancelling headphones while out in public to avoid that. Alone she moves backwards, obsessed with trying to return to that moment, that song she feels would set her world straight. Then she meets a nice guy, David (Justin H. Min) in a grief therapy session and things start to change.

The director, Ned Benson has explored this grief space before in his film trilogy The Disappearance of Elenor Rigby. The first two films explored the female and the male side of a tumultuous relationship, with the final film combining their perspectives. Later the films were fused into just one. The Beatles title made music an essential part of the story. Rigby were personal films for Benson and so feels The Grestest Hits. Grief and memory are his preferred themes and subjects. Films about them are his therapy space.

The Greatst Hits wants to be a romantic comedy, and it is in the end, but for most of its run time, it seems to be painfully avoiding that. It has all the expected elements- the hip location, the meet cute, the gay best friend, the crates of vinyl mined for nostalgic ennui, the pining, the hot guys, even chemistry- it just lacks the lightness and humor. It’s more of a lovelorn teen drama about moving past that first break up. The repetitiveness, its slow and gentle pace and storytelling gives the cast chances to breath and react to each other, to inhabit their characters and form seemingly authentic relationships.

It’s nice that the music in The Greatest Hits isn’t always on point and has that life shuffle feel to it.

Randomness is part of its charm- makes it feel like most everyone’s life in the way we create meaning and organization from chaos. In the end, it gets a good cry because Harriet works hard to get there- the re-meet cute that is just the beginning of her real story.