With the firm facing an existential crisis, Howard's partners Whit (Edward Norton), Claire (Kate Winslet), and Simon (Michael Peña) hatch the plan to wrest away his shares of the company. We fear death." (How understanding these core philosophical precepts will help the sales staff land big corporate accounts is best not contemplated.) Cut to three years later and Howard is a hollow, gray-haired shell of his former self, reduced to the metaphorical labor of setting up and knocking down dominos for days on end. "Cowardly" is a more accurate one.Ĭollateral Beauty opens with Howard (Smith), a charismatic and upbeat leader, rallying the troops with a speech about how love, time, and death connect every human being on earth. And how the best it can do is invent some ridiculous apparatus that's intended to be redemptive and therapeutic, but in reality serves to distance us from emotions too difficult to face head on. Both are about Hollywood's astonishing inability to cope with serious personal issues of any kind. Collateral Beauty is about a man coping with the loss of a child. Seven Pounds is about a man coping with guilt over his negligence in an accident that killed seven people. Collateral Beauty may be crazier than the suicide-by-jellyfish movie, but they're two sides of the same coin. The plan is to get him to rant and rave at the actors on camera, scrub them out digitally, and use his loosened grip on reality to gobble up his share of the company.Īnd that's just the half of it. When they hear he's been writing letters to the abstract concepts of Love, Time, and Death, they hire three out-of-work actors to embody those roles and harangue him like Ebenezer Scrooge's ghosts.
Screenwriters take heart, because the following pitch did not result in someone getting forcibly removed from the lot: Collateral Beauty is about three executives at a New York City advertising firm who want to push its co-founder out of the company because he's so crushed by grief over the death of his daughter a couple years earlier, he can no longer do his job.
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However, the play on the term ‘collateral damage’ fails to hit home as the movie takes a long-winded route to get there.(L-R) Helen Mirren as Brigitte, Keira Knightley as Amy and Jacob Latimore as Raffi in Collateral Beauty.īack in 2008, it seemed entirely reasonable to expect that Will Smith's career would never get stranger than Seven Pounds, a film in which his character (spoiler) commits suicide-by-jellyfish as part of an elaborate Oprah-by-way-of-Oskar-Schindler redemption scheme. The message being – when you accept your losses you can move beyond suffering and pain, down a path of redemption which is a thing of beauty. Their conversations play out like revelations through crisp dialogue. Seeing that thread unravel through the film is a joy to watch. Redemption for viewers is in the form of the unlikely relationships that develop between Amy and Whit, Raffi and Claire and Bridgette and Simon. But philosophy flies thick and fast, from minor characters as well. You hope that when the three actors enter Howard's life, there would be some comic relief. But at times, it gets a little overbearing and even the dry humour employed makes the suffering feel endless. ‘Collateral Beauty’ is a tearjerker heavy on emotions.
Enter Amy (Keira Knightley) as love, Raffi (Jacob Lattimore) as time and Bridgette (Helen Mirren) as death. They hire actors to become the three concepts to meet Howard and freak him out so he can be declared mentally unstable, thus saving the company. In a bid to have Howard relinquish his toxic hold over the company, his three associates play a trick on him.
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