Collateral Beauty (2016)
Review of Collateral Beauty (2016), directed by David Frankel
I felt a burning passion while sitting down to write this review today. Why, you may ask? It’s because I hated this movie so much. It’s honestly kind of messed up and the embodiment of the culture we live in today. But more on that later.
You’d think this would be a great movie by the synopsis. Which, on IMBd, is this: “Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time, and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.” Our main character is Will Smith, he’s lost his young daughter, and we have an all-star cast that wants to help him! Right? Riiiight.
Let’s get into this review because oh man do I have some thoughts.
Content
Will Smith is our main character in this movie. Like I mentioned before, he’s lost his daughter who was really young, and he doesn’t seem to have a wife around. He helps run a company with his business partners, but now he’s too depressed to work, which is problematic because he was the one in charge of company relationships with their high-profile clients. Now that they’re bleeding clients, his friends and business partners are like “oh shit what do we do” and guess what they do? They hire a private investigator to try and undermine Howard (Will Smith) and remove him as head of the company. Such great friends they are. I’m sure that’s absolutely wonderful for his mental health, losing his daughter and then his job.
So the private investigator finds out Howard has been writing these letters to abstract concepts such as Love, Death, and Time. So what do Howard’s quote-on-quote friends do? They hire a team of actors to try and make Howard seem like he’s crazy because they’re personifying what he wrote in the letters, thus making him seem like he’s full on nuts and definitely unable to run a company. But apparently it’s okay because his friends are suffering too, from a range from cancer, infertility, family disconnect. I’m sorry to say this but that doesn’t make it okay at all.
There’s a bit of romance sprinkled into this healing and gaslighting journey we’re venturing towards. It all goes down in a strange blur. I checked the time at one point in the movie and was so surprised to see only thirty minutes was left because it didn’t seem like a legitimate resolution was going to happen any time soon. And so when it did end and I felt like there wasn’t an actual ending, it felt a bit like a fraud to me. The acting was wonderful, this was a star-studded cast, but I cannot vibe at all with the messages this movie is trying to tell.
Like I totally get that the Love, Death, Time thing full on connects to the coworkers/friends who are trying to undermine Howard (because one is dying, one is seeking love, another needs time for a pregnancy), but it all comes across as fake-deep. This script needs to be majorly fixed because it is not okay to do this to another person despite them having their own issues. That’s literally capitalism, trying to profit off of another’s tragedy. The movie would’ve been perfectly fine if it was just Will Smith trying to learn how to grieve and heal on his own, finding love in the process? Although, as I read online, apparently that was his ex-wife from the start? I’m so confused now.
Overall Thoughts
This would be a great film to hate-watch. Or if you don’t want to think about it and accept it at face-value without having to put any efforts of thinking about what’s actually going on on the screen. Man, this movie got me so riled up. This man was literally stalked and exploited by his coworkers and it’s okay? No, Hollywood. Just no. Was so sad to see Keira Knightley in this flaming trash can too, alas.
