You'll Need Collateral if You're Seeing this Movie

          There are many ways people cope with loss. Some find and attend support groups, others find comfort in good memories and introspection. And some cope through more unusual methods. Such is the case with Howard Inlet in Collateral Beauty who writes letters to Love, Time, and Death. It’s important then when you know someone who’s gone through this kind of heartbreak, to be sensitive to how they go about coping. And not to take any advice from this movie.
          Collateral Beauty, the new drama from director David Frankel, is about Howard (Will Smith) a New York City ad executive who lost his daughter a couple years ago and is still having trouble coming to terms with it, being antisocial at work and resorting to writing and sending hand-written letters to those previously mentioned abstracts. His friends in the firm are worried about him, but things take a different turn when he starts having encounters with what appear to be the manifestations of Death (Helen Mirren), Time (Jacob Latimore), and Love (Keira Knightley).
          If you were looking forward to seeing this movie from the trailer, prepare to be deeply disappointed. The advertising made it look like a latter day Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life; a parable about man’s contact with supernatural beings revolutionizing his world-view and helping him recover from such a great loss. This premise is misleading to say the least. The actual characterizations of Love, Time, and Death which are far different than the marketing implied and how they fit in the story is incredibly frustrating and feels like a horrendously wasted opportunity. In fact “frustrating” is a great word to describe this movie on a whole. The script is pretty poor, especially in the exposition which is often very awkward. The biggest problem though is the awful direction the story goes in and how because of this the characters come across antithetical to the story’s intent. Which is a shame because not only is their potential in the idea, but Will Smith is giving it his all.
          Smith’s performance in this movie may clearly be that of someone vying for an Academy Award nomination, but it’s nonetheless very well done. It’s possibly one of his best, he conveys all the tragedy and depth of feeling of Howard and it really works. His occupation as an ad executive in New York is ludicrously clichéd though and we never actually see his relationship with his daughter giving us little reason to engage with his plight. Smith is devoted entirely, but this movie isn’t as much his film as we’ve been led to believe. To its detriment I might add. A large portion is concerned with his friends and partners at work played by Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Pena. Yeah this movie has a really impressive cast to it. Each of these characters has their own arc and we’re privy to their personal lives as much as Howards’. But these storylines feel really out of place, and Pena’s in particular is ridiculously desperate for your investment. Maybe they could’ve worked if only the characters were more likeable. These three, especially Norton, are really unlikeable in how they interfere with Howard’s grieving process and straight-up manipulate him. And yet they don’t feel any repercussions for this. It’s amazing how the film expects us to like them and how it backfires so radically. All the supporting actors are trying but they don’t have decent material to work with. The only ones who come out alright apart from Smith are Naomie Harris as a woman who runs a support group, and Helen Mirren who may be incapable of giving a bad performance.
          But on top of all this, perhaps the most irritating aspect of Collateral Beauty is that it thinks it’s really clever. It thinks its playing on your expectations that Love, Time, and Death are only affecting Howard, but it’s incredibly obvious what they’re really doing and where they’re really going. That and a couple laughably out-of-nowhere twists late in the movie give the impression the director and screenwriter are trying to show off something. They think by including abstract concepts as characters it makes the themes more layered, that they’re exploring profound ideas, but they’re not and instead it ends up being really pretentious. There’s a domino motif for example that’s in the film for no other purpose but to give the impression of depth. Even the title is annoyingly sententious.
          This is a movie that’s going for every vestige of sentimentality it can but it doesn’t have substance enough to earn any of it. It’s a promising idea executed in a tremendously poor way with a bad script and characters. What makes it more annoying than other bad films this year is that you can easily see where it could have gone right but the story direction makes every wrong choice. It does have a few good performances, most notably by Smith, and some nice cinematography and Christmas imagery, this is technically a holiday movie. But it’s more wrapped up in its own pretentiousness than its story and for that it utterly fails.