Music has an almost magical way of transporting us back to the moment we heard it in our lives: the pop song that confirmed your first kiss, the one played at your graduation ceremony and so on. In mopey, dopey YA weepie The Greatest Hits, writer-director Ned Benson takes this idea as literally as possible, treating certain tunes as triggers that draw Harriet (Lucy Boynton) back to her past, exploding her – like that sitting guy in Maxell’s classic campaign movie – into… The former’s tragic relationship is with Hanky Max (square-jawed future Superman David Corensweet), who died in a car accident.
Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? In fact, Harriet’s condition is a bit of a drag, because she wants to move on, but now must live her life wearing noise-cancelling headphones and curating playlists with only “safe” songs (those that have no potential for nostalgia). Music is important to Harriet, who has worked in the industry – Max turned out to be something of an indie rocker, while she mixed his album. Since the accident, she can no longer risk getting caught in the roller coaster of the wrong song, so she gets a job at the library (it’s quiet, get it?).
The whole thing feels like a huge effort to make this high-concept premise work, while leaving certain details—like how Harriet can hear conversations when her hearing is muffled—leaving maddeningly unexplained. You might also think that she would be more careful behind the wheel after surviving a fatal car accident. This is a love story. It is not meant to be logical. However, such a premise lives or dies by its execution, and aside from the pretty glows that fill the screen every time Harriet is about to zoom in, The Greatest Hits feels like a leftover version of the best love stories.
Set in the Los Feliz/Silver Lake neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the film notes that Harriet’s favorite way to listen to music is on vinyl. She lives in a house that a librarian couldn’t afford, and she’s covered the wall with one of those serial killer murals, which shows a timeline of her four-year relationship with Max broken down into song-specific moments. The rest of the room is centered on her turntable, where boxes of “untested” LPs are waiting for trial.
Because some songs take her back to the moments she first heard them, Harriet hopes she can find the missing musical cue that will allow her to change the past and save Max’s life. The guy looks like a movie star, but he seems like a fairly ordinary boyfriend, judging by the generic-looking memories sampled (flirting at a concert, playing together on the beach). She appears to be living in an allergy medicine commercial, which means the audience realizes long before Harriet does that the film wants her to move on.
Enter David (Justin H. Min), a sweet and goofy potential suitor who shows up at one of her grief support meetings. David’s parents have recently died, and he’s dealing with his own feelings, but for some reason (which Boynton’s performance doesn’t convey), hitting the girl with his headphones seems like a good idea. While trying to block out unwanted old songs, Benson organizes ways for Harriet and David to bond over new music: at a record store, attending a dance party DJed by her gay friend (Austin Crute), and so on.
Many of these scenes feel forced, as if Benson is presenting a thesis about how modern humans relate to music. However, most people do not remember the time and place of every song they heard. When they find a favorite song, that tune is played several times. The selections on “The Greatest Hits” range from indie rock to instrumentals (with random selections, like “Pump Up the Jam” inexplicably thrown in). These songs clearly mean something to Harriet — and perhaps to Benson as well — but they hold no significance to us, making the soundtrack incoherently eclectic.
However, the film’s purpose is clear: Harriet is understandably afraid of being in places filled with music, which serves as a means of showing how emotionally damaged individuals cautiously re-emerge in social settings. Although we’ve waited more than a decade to see what Benson, director of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, will do next, everything about this successful debut (a love story that’s split into a “he” and “her” POV) , and then braided again. Together) he indicated that he was capable of doing something much less conventional than this. It is a satirical play from a romantically minded director.