In some of the world’s most notorious prisons, interrogators employ “music torture.” Everything from Metallica to the Meow Mix jingle has been used to burrow deep into the minds of detainees to cause deep psychological pain. The tactic uses music to produced a desired response.
Emerging from the shadows of these hell holes is The Greatest Hits. Audiences enduring its wall-to-wall soundtrack may find themselves begging “make it stop” like POWs subjected to Barney the Dinosaur on repeat.
There’s a loop of sorts to The Greatest Hits. Music lover Harriet (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Lucy Boynton) wears headphones wherever she goes. They partly help her cope with grief over the death of her boyfriend, Max (Hollywood’s David Corenswet). They also tip her off to musical memories.
Harriet, see, has something of a gift. Any needle drop cues her to a memory that she shared with Max. She might recall a bad fight, as if that precipitated the car crash in which he died. Alternatively, an old favourite whisks her back to the day she and Max met, an impossibly cheesy story about love found in a mosh pit that evokes memories of Craig’s List Missed Connections.
Certain songs in the soundtrack of their lives actually let her jump back in time (I think?) and explore the memory with (perhaps?) the chance to change the future. Harriet (somehow?) realizes that she must identify one specific song that could change Max’s date with death. Reliving memories both joyous and painful, she finds to clear pattern to unlocking the musical mystery. (Okay, fine.)
The high concept flick offers something of a multi-verse Spotify playlist or whatever. But The Greatest Hits errs more on the “whatever” side. The execution skips more beats than a broken record as Harriet jumps from song to song.
Sometimes, people join her, like David (Beef’s Justin H. Min), the hottie she meets at grief counselling. He’s charming and musically ignorant enough to make Harriet’s idiosyncrasies tolerable. But how David kind-of/sort-of time travels with Harriet, if she even time travels rather than simply recesses into old memories, never makes sense.
It’s also a bit weird that the film frequently signals its 2020 setting, yet Harriet never employs her skills to prevent the collective trauma that happened that year. No song could cure COVID, it seems, and none can inspire the necessary “You go, girl!” suspension of disbelief that The Greatest Hits requires. The setting accentuates her selfishness.
Boynton’s mopey performance doesn’t do the film any favours, either. This character isn’t likable, sympathetic, or interesting. Moreover, her limited range forces the film to rely on the music to hit its emotional and dramatic beats. The Greatest Hits reduces songs to their cheapest and most sentimental notes.
Min, alternatively, gives the film a boost, but David’s interest in Harriet actually feels more farfetched than her memory-jumping does. And Nelly Furtado shows up for a random cameo, as does Drag Race season 14 trade Alyssa Hunter, because why not?
On one hand, it’s easy to see what makes The Greatest Hits attractive. It’s the long-awaited second feature from Ned Benson, who delivered such an assured consideration of love and loss, with just the right nod to a greatest hit, in 2013’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. Audiences who caught the she said/he said breakup film starring Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, which played at TIFF before Harvey Weinstein hacked it to bits, know that Benson is a serious talent who deserves another shot. Unfortunately, The Greatest Hits isn’t it. More thought went into the soundtrack than the screenplay.
It’s one of those movies that seems crafted to deliver a soundtrack with songs that hold sentimental meaning for the filmmaker. Sure, The Greatest Hits offers perfectly Shazammable listening. It’s just too bad that the soundtrack is attached to this film.
One might actually do the musicians a solid by taking note of the songs and listening to them later. There’s an eclectic list of indies. Jamie xx’s “Loud Places,” which appears when Harriet and Max meet at a concert, offers great listening if one can divorce it from the memory of The Greatest Hits. For a film that painstakingly mines the cognitive connection between music and memories, it really backfires. The Greatest Hits, frankly, is so twee that it risks creating negative associations with these tracks. It’s torture.
