Review: Collateral Beauty

Will Smith is paralysed with grief over the death of his daughter, and writes three angry letters to ‘Love’, ‘Death’, and The Ghost of Christmas Pres…er…sorry, wrong story. The last letter is addressed to ‘Time’. Meanwhile, his business partner Edward Norton has gotten an offer to sell, but he can’t do it because Smith is the majority stockholder. A chance encounter with an actress (Keira Knightley) gives Norton an idea: Hire actors to play ‘Love’, ‘Death’, and ‘Time’, get a private investigator to film their interactions with Smith, and basically make Smith look like he’s mentally incompetent so that Norton can sell. Did I mention that Norton is supposedly Smith’s friend? Yeah. Norton’s cohorts in this scheme are employees and supposed friends of Smith’s played by Kate Winslet and Michael Pena, whilst Dame Helen Mirren plays another actress, and Naomie Harris plays a grief counsellor Smith seeks out one night. Also, Smith’s colleagues have little side dilemmas of their own for which ‘Love’, ‘Death’, and ‘Time’ lend a helping hand to as well. Oh, and it’s set largely at Christmas, of course.

It doesn’t initially make sense. It surely shouldn’t have been this way. A film with this kind of star power and it was a massive flop with both critics and audiences? Sadly, it’s not only true, but having seen this 2016 wannabe Capra-esque tear-jerker from director David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”, “Marley & Me”), it’s a much deserved fate. Easily the worst film of its year, the blame almost entirely falls upon a repeat offender in screenwriter Allen Loeb (“The Switch”, “The Dilemma”, “Just Go With It”). Although I rather enjoyed “Things We Lost in the Fire”, all of Loeb’s screenplays I’ve come across have been centred around irritating premises that depend upon massive contrivances. Usually this is in the form of supposedly intelligent people telling lies simply because they’ve been scripted to do so, and then telling more lies and so on. Loeb’s characters rarely if ever resemble people you’d find in the real world, and that’s no exception here in this ghastly wannabe weepie bullshit.

Producer/screenwriter Loeb’s fondness for contrivance and artificiality comes early in this one, and it’s the kind of thing you’ll either go with or you’ll spend every moment resisting and hating it. It would appear that a great majority of people resisted the urge to even see the film, and those who have seen it have largely resisted its so-called beauty. A good indicator of which camp you’ll be in is to look at the premise: A grieving and angry Will Smith writes letters (Letters? In 2016? Really?) to Death, Time, and Love to express his anger with the personal affront he feels has been committed against him. His employees and business partner hire actors to portray these ‘concepts’ in order to paint him as a crazy person so that they can sell the business. Yep, that’s the premise, a premise that could never remotely resemble anything plausible in the real world. I’m pretty sure a great majority of people would reject this film from the idiotic premise alone. I don’t know how the cast didn’t do the same. Kate Winslet in particular, who previously dealt with some of these same themes in the vastly superior “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. Smith gets saddled with a dud part that implausibly sees him giving everyone the silent treatment for what seems like a couple of years. Yeah, that’d happen in the real world I’m sure. As for poor Naomie Harris, she gets the unenviable task of bringing up the film’s title, which I always hate. Worse, she encourages a man supposedly hallucinating to actually engage with his hallucinations. After a while the reason for this is revealed, but it’s yet another contrivance that could only take place in a fictional movie.

Also, the characters are mostly horrible. It’s truly horrible and cruel what these people are doing to Smith, well-intentioned or not (and Michael Pena’s character in particular has a very personal reason for doing what he’s doing, I guess), and it makes you loathe them. Worse, in a film founded on a plethora of problems and contrivances (not to mention some well-intentioned ‘gaslighting’), one of the biggest is this notion that their plan would somehow result in Smith being seen as mentally unfit to continue to run the company. However, the way we see the plan play out, it’s an obvious and clear contrived plan involving him being conveniently caught on tape. No one would buy that as anything other than a scam, even if they do manage to digitally erase the ‘people’ Smith is talking to (I can’t imagine they’d be able to afford to pay an FX whiz to do it).

The screenplay here is just appalling in so many ways, leaving cast and director helpless. The final two twists are the last insult, it actually genuinely pissed me off it was firstly such shamefully contrived, ‘intentional misdirection’ bullshit, followed by just dumbfuck nonsense. This is eye-rolling, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were walk-outs in the theatre. The cast is actually good (though Norton and Knightley have zero chemistry), and yet it’s still terrible. Loeb’s contrived screenplays usually play as dopey comedies, done here as predominantly a real-world weepie drama, it’s even worse than his usual standard. There isn’t a believable moment in the entire film, and I don’t for a second believe Loeb’s statement that it’s meant to be a fable. Nope, it’s meant to be taken as the real world, if not taken entirely literally perhaps.

What the hell happened here? Awkward, weepie fantasy crap that doesn’t even begin to work and frequently insults one’s intelligence. Also, I still have no clue what ‘Collateral Beauty’ actually is even after Harris apparently explains it. So well done there, too.

Rating: D-