The Greater Good directed by Sophia Coppola [Dreamworks]
[American Beauty 2]
The story, which takes place in 1993 Beverly Hills, is about a woman, played by Julianne Moore, who accidentally leaves her children in a grocery store, and realizes they’re missing while putting her groceries in her car, dropping a gallon of milk onto the pavement floor. For five weeks she tries to find them by calling everyone in town, putting fliers up, contacting the police and the FBI, and calling into news and radio stations hoping that people can help her find them.
She starts to drink. Her husband, played by Clive Owen, whom she divorced after the LA riots because she realized she married someone who was racist, accuses his ex wife of murdering the children. His suspicions stem from bitter revenge, and the fact that Julianne is a born again Christian - while he is atheist. The towns people begin to turn on her, and ask her to leave the suburban home she grew up in, which was given to her by her Father’s will and testament. She packs her things up, moves to San Francisco, holds up in a one bedroom studio apartment, and begins to question whether she should commit suicide, or seek revenge on the only person she assumes stole her children, played by Nicole Kidman [hair in a villainous ponytail, black business attire, Lisbon accent]. The reasons why Julianne thinks this woman stole her children is because 1] She has an accent which means she’s “foreign”, 2] Julianne sees Nicole at the grocery store the day the children go missing, 3] She quietly has suspicions that Clive had feelings for Nicole, and 4] She needs to blame someone, so she points her finger at someone who tried to shut down her Sunday church, The Church of Christ.
The three children weren’t kidnapped. They were taken by an FBI agent, played by Kevin Spacey, who was investigating people who attended The Church of Christ for espionage and tax evasion, and decides to take matters into his own hands after discovering that Julianne Moore was committed to a mental hospital twice for mass hysteria, arrested for domestic violence once, fired from a job for behavioral misconduct seven times, and entered rehab for heroin addiction when she was 23 (where she found religion). Kevin contacts Child Protective Services and they explain that under his jurisdiction, he can barrel in, take the children away, and claim it was because of child neglect, without informing the mother or the father. And this was law up until 1995.
Michelle Pfieffer plays a detective who seduces her way into the home of Clive Owen's brother, played by Tom Hardy, and tells him that she is trying to track down three missing boys who went missing from a supermarket. Tom suggests she speak to the town mayor, Tom Wilkinson, who is facing a judicial committee for money laundering from the Transitional Assistance and Welfare Agency.
Nicole decides to run for town mayor of LA. She runs on the platform that everything happens for a reason. Her campaign team, lead by Rashida Jones, suggests they use Julianne and the missing children’s case as a way to get people to vote for her by saying they are going to reinstate the death penalty. The townspeople agree, she’s voted into office, and her first act as mayor is a search and seizure warrant for both Julianne and Clive’s property and household.
Julianne catches wind that Nicole is running as she watches Nicole standing at a podium with a slogan that reads “Everything Happens for a Reason”, and Julianne starts to think that maybe what happened to her children was a political conspiracy. She contacts the LAPD and confesses that she at one point didn’t think she would be a good mother, and that having children might have been the wrong decision. The LAPD files the complaint with the FBI, and Kevin Spacey sends an agent, played by Matthew McConaughey, out to arrest Julianne in San Francisco for child neglect and home convergency, claiming evidence that dropping a gallon of milk is proof that she is unfit to be a mother. When he gets there however, he discovers Julianne dead in her bathtub, with no cuts or bruises on her body.
Clive has his house raided. He stands there with a glass of scotch and sugar in disbelief that men and women in black attire are rummaging around in his personable belongings. They find a gun, a black hat, and a note from his ex-wife saying that she was leaving him because he “has a thing against black people”. An officer standing by, played by Denzel Washington, arrests him, and takes him away.
Nicole starts to investigate Julianne’s death herself, while in the comfort of her 4.5 million dollar home. She tells her husband, played by Christian Bale, that she believes Julianne was murdered, and that it must have had something to do with the disappearance of the children. [“Oh, so now it’s a kidnapping, honey? They just disappeared, now?” - “Well, it’s either that, or she couldn’t live with the guilt.”] Upon returning home from a mayoral ceremony, she receives a letter in the mail [from Kevin Spacey] saying to "let it go".
Michelle has searched every orphanage, every homeless shelter, every street alley, and to her dismay, realizes that the police of Beverly Hills are too busy trying to track down their retirement benefits, rather than save the lives of three innocent boys, who she fears have been taken into Mexico as illegal aliens in a country where anyone is welcome. Michelle asks one of the police officers, Denzel, to accompany her to San Jose so that she can speak with a Catholic Priest, played by Bradley Pitt, who was found guilty of child trafficking.
Matthew has reservations about what to do when the FBI and the LAPD ask him to investigate the “crime scene” in San Francisco, but do it quietly so no one really knows what happened. He thinks that maybe something happened to Julianne that shouldn’t have, and he makes his way down to LA to see if he can question Clive, Clive’s brother, and Julianne’s mother, played by Sissy Spacek, who now lives in a nursing home, and is suffering from Dementia.
Things start to sour very quickly. Nicole is moved for impeachment because Matthew McConaughey starts to question whether she had anything to do with the death of Julianne after discovering a memo in LA saying to go after Julianne no matter what the cost is, dead or alive. Kevin Spacey starts to develop paranoia that people in powerful places will figure out why the children went missing: that their disappearance was political, and Kevin believed that Nicole winning the election would be good for the people. He begins working on making sure Nicole has to step down - after he hears she's trying to have him fired - and Matthew has to resign from the agency - after he starts suspecting Spacey of child abduction. Julianne’s family has a funeral service for her, and only one person shows up. Clive sits behind bars for 5 weeks contemplating why he ever made the decision to move to America. Tom, on visitation, tells Clive he has to go back to England because they discovered he had no visa. Sissy eventually passes away in the nursing home, where the Nursing Home Executive, played by James Cromwell, ensures he is head of her estate by claiming that the home Julianne was forced out of was his. Christian files for divorce against Nicole, and Kevin Spacey uses the filing as evidence that she must have been guilty of something. And finally, the children that went missing are brought into the supermarket where they were taken from back in 1993, and left there to make it look like they never went missing at all.
The film ends with Michelle taking the boys to an orphanage, the boys running away, and finding their way to Clive Owen's ransacked apartment, which has been foreclosed and deserted by a man who was deported back to England.
And you realize that what happened to Julianne Moore was a high school grudge.
Based on a True Story
