Word: sarandon
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Susan Sarandon has had a rough go of it as a mother on screen. She lost daughters in Moonlight Mile and Little Women, a soldier son in In the Valley of Elah and in Lorenzo's Oil fought valiantly to save her terminally ill child's life. It's no wonder that the overwrought film The Greatest, which features Sarandon as mother coping with the death of her 18 year-old son Bennett (Aaron Johnson), feels so familiar; mad, sad mothers represent a large part of her filmography...
...allow the maid to pick their son's dirty socks up off the floor. (Writer/director Shana Feste has made the Brewers rich, and you can almost hear her pitch to the studio, filled with longing for the profound: "See, they had everything, but now, without Bennett, nothing.") All the Sarandon grief moves are there: the defiant head lift, the wide, wet eyes, the clenched fists, the accusations hurled at Allen for his lack of emotion; The Greatest often feels like a mash-up of Sarandon's greatest grief hits. (See TIME's 2009 video of 10 Questions with Susan Sarandon...
Undeniably, grieving people do crazy, melodramatic things. But Sarandon here is unfairly saddled with unsympathetic actions; indeed, she's turned into what amounts to the villain of the piece. Grace is mean to Rose, oblivious to her other son, the pill-popping Ryan (Johnny Simmons from Hotel for Dogs) and cold and cutting to Allen. But unlike the mother figure played by Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, Grace isn't really cold. We know she'll come around eventually - this isn't a movie with tricks up its sleeve - and the wait grows tedious. (See pictures of movie costumes...
...photo gallery on the life and career of Susan Sarandon...