Collateral Beauty (2016)

Collateral Beauty (2016)

Director: David Frankel

Writer: Allan Loeb

Stars: Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet

PG-13 | 1h 37min | Drama 

Movie rating 5.9/10

Story line 

When a successful New York advertising executive suffers a great tragedy, he retreats from life. While his concerned friends try desperately to reconnect with him, he seeks answers from the universe by writing letters to Love, Time and Death. But it's not until his notes bring unexpected personal responses that he begins to understand how these constants interlock in a life fully lived, and how even the deepest loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty

Read imdb review here

Lots of Plastic in the Face of ‘Collateral Beauty’

The five stages of grief sometimes seem applicable to movie reviewing, except that I usually skip denial, rarely get around to acceptance and generally just settle into anger, which is where I am with “Collateral Beauty.” Many of the words that I would like to use to describe this waste of talent and time, which riffs on Dickens’s eternal “A Christmas Carol” and tries to manufacture feeling by offing Tiny Tim, can’t be lobbed in a family publication. So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.

It’s hard to choose just one barb given that there is not a single real or honest moment in this movie, beginning with the opener. Will Smith plays Howard, a hotshot New York advertising type who delivers Jerry Maguire-style bromides to his co-workers about how they don’t really sell stuff, but connections. Howard actually seems to believe all this rah-rah rubbish, as do the grinning zombies who work alongside him. A few years later, though, he has become one of the walking dead, having lost his only child. Bereft and now single, he spends his time at work mutely creating elaborate domino runs while the rest of the staff anxiously hovers, trying to keep the failing business afloat.

The story involves Howard’s three associates and ostensible friends (Edward Norton, Michael Peña, Kate Winslet) trying to wrest control of the company from him. In his grief, he has written letters to love, time and death, all of which he has a beef with, which suggests he needs real help. Instead, the associates hire actors (Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore, Helen Mirren) to personify these abstractions, the idea being that they will engage Howard while he’s being secretly taped. The associates will then doctor the results to make it look as if he’s talking to himself. It’s a cruel, mercenary strategy, but the movie is selling uplift, not a lesson in 21st-century rapacious capitalism, so their duplicity is delivered with sniffles, smiles and hollow rationalizations.

The movie was largely shot in New York, but the city is little more than generic addresses, a sterile background filled with busily scurrying extras and other visual noise, so it’s a wonder the filmmakers even bothered. These characters don’t actually live or work in the city, but occupy narrative placeholders, including at the advertising office, which is filled with pretty people doing nothing that resembles work in front of equipment that looks as shiny and blank as they do. Homes, in turn, look like shopping catalogs and are vacuumed of anything remotely suggesting life. Unwisely tamped down, Mr. Smith delivers a generally monotonal performance flecked with grimaces and frowns. He’s forced to spend a lot of time bicycling angry; it’s easy to see why he’s pissed.

It seems unlikely that any director could convincingly transform this much plastic into something resembling reality. The director David Frankel did some fine, crisp work in “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), but never locates a human pulse here. Written by Allan Loeb, the movie lightly borrows from Dickens — each abstraction functions as a kind of guide on the path to enlightenment or whatever — but much of the dialogue sounds like extracts from the kinds of carefully nondenominational spiritual books that have “journey” in the title. Yet despite all the miles that Howard finally racks up, it soon becomes very clear he will be going nowhere. His journey is a dead end.

Read full review at New york times

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Movie rating ★★☆☆

 Tearjerker works, but doesn’t live up to its stellar cast

To watch “Collateral Beauty” is to feel both moved and manipulated. If there are tears, they’ll be practically squeezed out of you by a tragic plot device: the death of a little girl.

That girl’s father, Howard (Will Smith), is the man at the center of the story. Two years after the loss, he’s still struggling to cope with his grief. Once the charismatic president of an ad agency, an upbeat man who gave his employees TED-like pep talks, he now spends his days carefully constructing intricate domino displays, only to — metaphor alert — knock them all down. Living alone in a minimalist New York apartment, Howard doesn’t eat or sleep much, though he has picked up one especially interesting hobby: He composes letters — handwritten, addressed and actually mailed — to such to abstract concepts as Love, Time and Death.

These letters would, no doubt, have landed in a post office trash can if Howard’s closest friends hadn’t hired a private investigator to follow him. Whit, Claire and Simon (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Peña) also happen to work with Howard, and they have a baldly self-serving reason to follow him. Sure, they’re worried about him, a little, but they also want to prove that he’s not mentally competent enough to run the company so that the trio can sell the place and make bank.

In an apparent effort to soften the ickiness of the scheming, the film is also set up so that each character just happens to be dealing with his or her own issues: Whit is penniless after a bitter divorce that has turned his daughter against him; Claire has been married to her job all these years and laments never starting a family; and Simon has a suspicious cough that won’t go away. Better get that checked.

Things get even more complicated when Howard’s “friends” hire three actors, played by Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore and Helen Mirren, to impersonate Love, Time and Death, and to and confront Howard about the letters. The dubious plan is to secretly record those interactions — a depressed man having heated conversations with abstract entities — then edit out the actors. Voilà: proof of insanity.

To put it more bluntly, this story doesn’t really make sense. But what’s the point of a plot anyway, when you have extreme close-ups of Smith, his bloodshot eyes welling with tears as he thinks back to a sunny afternoon in a park with his daughter (Alyssa Cheatham)? The movie’s manipulations are no more subtle than those of Howard’s friends — and they’re just as effective. What kind of stone-cold monster wouldn’t get emotional watching a father mourn?

When Smith isn’t on screen, the movie maintains a surprisingly breezy tone, given the dark subject matter. The comedic aspects shouldn’t come as a shock, though, considering that the movie was written by Allan Loeb, the screenwriter of such comedies as “Here Comes the Boom” and “Just Go With It.” Mirren is especially amusing as a Bohemian artiste who’s delighted by the acting challenge of playing Death. “This is Chekhov,” she says after meeting Howard for the first time. Most of the other A-listers, however, aren’t given nearly as much to do.

“Collateral,” which was directed by David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada,” “Marley & Me”), has the gloss of an expensive, slickly produced project. New York City never looked so clean, nor sadness so beautiful. The movie manages to be simultaneously superficial and heartbreaking. That’s no easy feat — nor is it a laudable one.

Read full review at Washington post

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Movie rating ★☆☆☆☆

Will Smith plays grieving father who encounters unlikely twists and turns

Collateral Beauty" should win some kind of award for Best Execution of a Truly Dreadful Concept. Chock-a-block with magnetic movie stars, and shot beautifully by talented cinematographer Maryse Alberti, all twinkling lights and Christmas in the city, it looks like an important and meaningful film. That's all smoke and mirrors. Stars and cinematography can't save the story, which is a misguided tale filled with armchair philosophizing and ultimately meaningless twists.

It feels as though screenwriter Allan Loeb thought up the term "collateral beauty," thought it was neat, and then reverse-engineered a story where the characters could say "collateral beauty" a lot. "Look for the collateral beauty," they say. Does that refer to Mr. Rogers' idea of looking for the helpers in a crisis? Not really, nope. It's a phrase that seems like something the teenage Wes Bentley from "American Beauty" would have invented while chasing a plastic bag down the street with a camcorder.

To even explain the premise feels like spoiling the movie, but, seriously, you gotta hear this. Will Smith plays Howard, "poet philosopher of product," or as we would say, an advertising executive, who gives inspiring but empty speeches to his staff demanding to know "what is your why?" and blabbing about the "three abstractions" of love, time and death. That's what advertising is all about, baby.

The death of his child sends him into a downward spiral, until he's nearly catatonic, leading a life of angry bicycling, extensive domino set ups, and letter writing to love, time and death. This regime is obviously not great for business, so his partners (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Pena) decide the best course of action is to shakedown his majority voting shares by proving he's mentally incompetent to make decisions. They hire a private eye (Ann Dowd), and the strangest theater company of all time, Brigitte (Helen Mirren), Amy (Keira Knightley) and Raffi (Jacob Latimore) to pretend to be the three abstractions and confront Howard on the street. This plan, it's cockamamie.

The far more interesting movie would be the one that explains just how Brigitte and Raffi came to be in a theater company together, but alas, the plot skitters around as we watch Howard emerge from his fugue state. This "devastated and unstable" vibe is not Smith's best zone as an actor, so it begs the question why he still chooses these cheesy, quasi-uplifting, high-concept projects such as "Seven Pounds" or "The Pursuit of Happyness" every few years.

There's never any real definition of "collateral beauty," just some vague aphorisms that "we are all connected." But the movie, obsessed with its own twists and inane mysticism, essentially robs the meaning from that idea. If the film explored how strangers and loved ones managed to overcome emotional obstacles and learn things from each other that would be poignant. Instead we have a demented tapestry of bizarre interactions and strange choices that results in a bigger picture that reveals absolutely nothing at all.

Perhaps the idea was this half-baked from the get-go, or maybe the film was edited within an inch of its life and lost all meaning. Whatever the case, for all of its faux-deep gesturing, "Collateral Beauty" is much more shallow nonsense than anything else.Read full review at chicago tribune

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Nakedly Pandering Collateral Beauty Deserves a Lump of Coal

Pinpointing one fatal flaw is impossible—the transgressions pile up like a trash heap of Christmas miracles

Every so often there comes a movie so tasteless, so nakedly pandering, so bodaciously ill conceived that you’ve got to see it to believe it. This year, that movie is Collateral Beauty. Will Smith plays Howard, an advertising exec who hasn’t been able to pull his life together since his six-year-old daughter died from a rare ailment a few years back. His business partners—played by Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Peña—are worried: The company is running aground, and they have failed in getting Howard, whose grief is so intense he can barely function, to sign a crucial deal that will save it. So they band together and hatch a brilliant scheme: Why not hire actors to play Love, Death and Time, and send them ’round to Howard’s house, A Christmas Carol-style, to give him a good talking-to? Their hope is that Howard will either recover enough from his emotional malaise to sign the papers, or he’ll look so crazy that they’ll be able to legally wrest the company’s control from him. With friends like these…

The three recruit a trio of actors from a struggling local company: Keira Knightley is feisty, temperamental Love. Jacob Latimore is Time, a fast-talking dealmaker on a skateboard. And Helen Mirren shows up, in a fetching blue coat, as Death. (You can be forgiven for hoping the Grim Reaperess looks this good when she shows up for you.) Each pays Howard a visit. Understandably, he can hardly believe what’s happening. Meanwhile, his colleagues have the meetings recorded and then work advertising-special-effects magic to erase the actors, so it appears that Howard is talking to himself. With friends like these…

Everybody—the business partners, the actors, grief-benumbed Howard—will learn a life lesson here, because no character ever gets out of a movie like this one without it. But Howard’s business partners never really reckon with what an underhanded thing they’ve done to him: Their lessons come in the form of making peace with not having a child, or facing the truth of a fatal illness, or repairing a fractured family relationship. It’s hard to feel anything for any of them.

Pinpointing one fatal flaw in Collateral Beauty is impossible—the transgressions pile up like a trash heap of Christmas miracles. The director is David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me), working from a script by Alan Loeb (21, Just Go with It), and you almost can’t blame them for trying: The basic concept is so loopy it just might have worked, had it been approached with a drier sense of humor. But Smith—who, through much of his career, has proved to be an effortlessly likable and often affecting performer—plays the act of grieving like a child miming the trajectory of a garden snail in a school play. And you may be wondering what, exactly, the movie’s title means. Even though one character or another declaims the phrase at least four times—or is it fourteen?—I still have no idea. In this instance, does collateral mean extra stuff floating around? Or something pledged as security for repayment of a debt? Either way, it’s enough to make you wonder what you ever did in life to deserve such a movie.

Read full review at Time

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Will Smith's Gonzo Original Melodrama Is Worth Defending

Collateral Beauty is just a little insane, but its insanity is so good-hearted and sincere that it won be over. The plot, if spelled out in a review, makes the picture feel like a grotesque horror show, and there will be those who understandably can’t get past the core premise. But in an age where we are always decrying a dependence on formula and franchise, Collateral Beauty is a crazed original. It is the kind of movie that used to just be “a movie” but now almost qualifies as an act of courage. The film isn’t quite the sum of its parts, but it is a gloriously messy piece of almost courageous melodrama that gives a deluge of terrific actors ample room to play.

Read full review at Forbes

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