Collateral Beauty

Collateral Beauty

Starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren 

Directed by David Frankel

The Story:
Howard Inlet (Will Smith) is a successful advertising executive with a bunch of co-workers who consider him as family: Whit (Edward Norton) - who's dealing with a divorce and a young daughter who doesn't love him anymore; Claire (Kate Winslet) - who's devoted so much of her life to work she fears she might've missed out on motherhood; and Simon (Michael Pena) - who's got a loving family but seems to be coughing an awful lot lately.

The film begins with everyone being all happy and healthy, a part of a vibrant ad company in New York that's booming.  Then, three years later, everything is falling apart.  Howard lost his young daughter, and is now reclusive, despondent and depressed, and his friends are worried about him - and more importantly worried about their jobs.

They hire a private investigator who tells them that Howard has been writing letters to Death, Love and Time, but it's not enough to convince lawyers that he's inept at his job, so Whit hires three actors - Aimee (Keira Knightly), Raffi (Jacob Latimore) and Brigitte (Helen Mirren) to play Love, Time and Death to Howard and record it so it looks like he's gone crazy. 

As they try to interact with Howard, he begins opening up to grief counselor Madeleine (Naomie Harris), who has also lost a daughter to illness.  The two begin growing closer, the actors keep pressuring Howard to face his past, and his friends wonder if they did the right thing or not.  However, there could be more than meets the eye and not everything is what it seems.

The Synopsis:
When I first saw the trailer to this film, I was beyond excited.  It looked like a great tear-jerker movie filled with illustrious stars and an amazing story.  Even the second trailer made me even more excited, and I couldn't wait to finally see it.

Then I saw it.  And I was very disappointed. 

Ultimately, it was something I should've seen coming a mile away.  When you have a movie with a ton of talent - two Oscar winners (Winslet & Mirren) and three Oscar nominees (Smith, Knightley & Norton), you would expect something truly stellar and memorable.  Instead, what we got was great actors giving their B game, and it was like watching a Hallmark made-for-television movie or a cheap off-Broadway show.  The actors didn't seem to put their all here, and it seemed like they were just going through the motions as they waited for their next big blockbuster.

The story was convoluted and, oddly enough, too short.  If the movie had been expanded beyond the slim 97 minute runtime, it could've been something spectacular.  Instead, the pacing was off, and the story seemed to go in a million different directions with no substantial payoff.  Was Knightley, Latimore and Mirren's characters just mere actors, or were they REALLY the personifications of Love, Time and Death?  That's up for the viewer to interpret, as the script lazily gave clues to one or the other being the real truth without flat out saying it, but the clues were so minuscule that not even the best CSI agent could solve it.  We only see them interacting with Howard's friends (ironically enough they were paired up with the friend going through the certain issue: Whit wanted the love of his daughter, and often only interacted with Aimee; Claire wanted more time to start a family and often only interacted with Raffi; Simon feared death was coming soon and often only interacted with Brigitte.  Yet, there's evidence that they were also just actors doing a job as well.  We don't know in the end definitively what they were.

In regards to Will Smith's character, this kind of role is his bread and butter.  He's perfect at playing the emotionally unstable family man ("The Pursuit of Happyness" and even "Suicide Squad" played to those strengths), but not even he could make us really feel for his loss.  This probably is due to the complete lack of interaction with his daughter in the movie, something that could've been remedied with a longer runtime.  The only scene we see the daughter in is the video of him twirling her around.  Sure, they seem loving and having a great time, but we're not nearly as emotionally connected to the daughter as we should've been. 

The one real shining moment came with the big reveal at the end, but even that couldn't save this muddled mess from ending up a complete washout, and turn out to be - as Mirren's character even mentioned in the movie - a gaslight ("to manipulate by psychological means into questioning their own sanity").

The Summary:
"Collateral Beauty" tried to be something more than it was, and with a short runtime and A-list actors turning in their B-level work, it turned out to be a muddled mess more fit for a Hallmark movie than a big-budget blockbuster.

The Score: C+