In the customarily insufferably cutesy romance The Biggest Hits, our heroine travels again in time every time a tune from her previous is performed, nostalgia performing as a magical, transporting drive. Whereas watching the movie, we too are pulled again however somewhat to all the far superior movies we’re inconveniently reminded of, from Excessive Constancy to Richard Curtis’s equally high-concept About Time to the ’00s Sundance breakouts (500) Days of Summer time and Backyard State. It’s a movie in regards to the energy that nice music has in distracting us from the now that as a substitute showcases the facility that nice movies have in distracting us from the lesser ones they encourage.
However even with out the numerous whiffs of familiarity, writer-director Ned Benson’s movie would nonetheless be hitting a bum be aware. It’s all too self-consciously raveled, each band T-shirt wanting much less prefer it was discovered at a gig and extra prefer it was purchased at an City Outfitters and it’s this slick cleanness that impacts each type and story. Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is caught in a grief spiral after her longtime boyfriend Max (new Superman David Corenswet) dies in a automobile accident. She’s shifted jobs, grow to be withdrawn and walks round with ear plugs and an enormous pair of headphones as a result of it’s not simply that sure songs take her thoughts again to sure moments with him, it’s that they take her complete physique as nicely. If she hears a tune that was enjoying in some unspecified time in the future throughout their relationship, she’s thrown again to that actual second. Her efforts to save lots of him stay fruitless, although, and so her blessing turns into a curse.
Benson’s debut The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby – an formidable trilogy of movies following the dissolution of a wedding from totally different views – supplied up one thing tantalising in idea, however he by no means fairly discovered sufficient reality or uncooked emotion to have an effect on us in the way in which a movie about one thing so tough actually ought to. We’re in glossier, extra heightened territory right here, however in a movie about grief and the way we wrestle to course-correct after loss, and there’s additionally nothing wrenching inside, every little thing too broad and stylised to get to us. The choice to solely present Max both in Harriet’s temporary journeys again or in fleeting montage implies that we by no means actually get to know him as something however a good-looking cipher, and so we’re instructed to mourn a relationship meaning nothing. Her thankless homosexual bestie tells her “you misplaced your self once you misplaced him,” which implies little or no after we don’t know who he or she ever was.
Harriet meets somebody new – the charming Justin H Min – however their courtship is just too twee and synthetic in addition to dated (at one second, I stated he’d higher not be taking her to a silent disco, and he then takes her to a silent disco). It’s the type of real-people-don’t-act-like-this romance that Min’s final movie, Randall Park’s incisive comedy Shortcomings, would have ridiculed. Even the fantastical parts don’t make that a lot sense, magic with guidelines which can be unfastened and undefined, leaving us with an eye-roll of an ending we will see from a mile away.
Premiering at SXSW, it strikes extra like a Sundance movie from years prior or one a studio would craft to appear to be it belonged there, a calculated crowd-pleaser with a chilly, artificial really feel. Regardless of that title, this one’s a miss.
