Fresh off the success of the summer musical smash "Mamma Mia!," Pierce Brosnan is poised to score again in 2009 with his latest, called "The Greatest," which debuted to great reviews at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend. The film, shot over a six week period last year in New York, was accepted into Sundance and seems certain to find a distributor given the critical buzz. The plotline is soap opera-ish for sure - Brosnan and Oscar winner Susan Sarandon play a married couple whose world is torn asunder after their teenage son is killed in a car crash. Their grief envelops them in different ways. Sarandon becomes obsessed with the driver of the car in the crash, holding vigil at his bedside, hoping he'll awake from his coma and offer insight into her son's last moments. Brosnan, meanwhile, plays a college professor, and he tries to stay strong and composed - with the aid of a girlfriend, a fellow professor. Their surviving son is wracked with feelings of inadequacy, and he has a drug problem to boot. And their dead son's girlfriend is pregnant. Sounds like "General Hospital" or what! The script, direction and acting, though, make it much more substantive than a movie of the week, though. "Sarandon is strikingly sympathetic as the brittle, obsessive mother, while Brosnan's calm rectitude smartly masks a man on the verge of imploding. Both performances are daring and brilliantly shaded," said Reuters. Fox News gossip columnist Roger Friedman, chiding Brosnan for being "awful in a cheap looking, terrible movie that was an inexplicable hit," - Mamma Mia! - says the Irishman is back on track with "The Greatest." "Brosnan and the remarkable Susan Sarandon are just perfect in a film that clearly echoes Robert Redford's classic "Ordinary People," but has enough new twists to make it very interesting," he writes. Speaking of "Mamma Mia!" - one of the biggest movie musicals of all time, while the film's platinum selling soundtrack still sits in Billboard magazine's Top 20, after 27 weeks - Pierce says he'd be happy to star in another musical if the chance arose, even though Fox's Friedman and a host of other critics would beg him not to. "Why not, sure. Why not? It was great the first time round and yeah... it was a great success," Brosnan said while promoting his new film at Sundance.
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