Collateral Beauty: A Peculiar Look into Grief
During the craziness of awards season, it sometimes can be hard to shine for many low budget movies. This is especially true if a film is trying to be different and original so it can compete with its counterparts. “Collateral Beauty” was set up to be one of those films. Instead however, it turned out to be a movie that had a peculiar perspective about grief.
Even from the start I knew that this movie was in deep trouble. The film follows a very depressed boss (Will Smith) of an advertisement agency who has lost his six year old daughter to cancer. To cope with his loss, he writes letters to time, death, and love. His co-workers find the need to hire actors to pretend to be those three things in order to make him feel better. The hope is that it will work.
With a cast like this, you would think that this could be a successful movie. The film was able to acquire, Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightly, Helen Mirren, Edward Norton, and Michael Pena. However, the film was actually quite flat and dis-ingeuine.
I saw the effort that the filmmakers were trying to put into this, but it just became mean-spirited. Your trying to cheer up a guy who lost his child by manipulating his mind even more by hiring actors to follow him and pretend that the actors aren’t there. To me, it seems a little messed up. The many twists and turns the film took also fell short of any relevance to realism. Nothing here made sense in any way shape or form.
It’s hard for me to criticize this film because no one was doing this just for the money. The movie was just weird though. Edward Norton’s character had kind of a creepy arc that was a little unsettling, and some of the plot points were just disregarded by the end. Without spoiling anything, I just want to say how odd the climax was as well. It just made the whole story even more unrealistic. The screenwriting was just incompetent as well. Every time there was supposed to be an emotional statement, the script would just ruin any realistic outcome of that scene. It made things laughable at some points.
Will Smith wasn’t even a character either. Most of the time he didn’t say much and that might confuse the audience. We don’t get a clear sense of why he continues to ignore people’s help along the way. The scenes of him on his bike making angry faces was quite unnecessary as well, because it was hard to take his situation seriously.
The only real aspects that redeemed this movie from being off of my worst of list were, the ability to direct a kind of beautiful film, and also Michael Pena’s arc. He probably had the most genuine character that I could take seriously. Director David Frankel definitely has talent when capturing the New York scene, but even that couldn’t make up for this lackluster script.
I will always respect originality when it comes to making a movie. However, this movie was way to incompetent for me to say that the different plot resulted in a home run of a film. The script, and awkward twists and turns were definitely the downfall for this train wreck.
