Collateral Beauty is the new Will Smith movie about a man who’s daughter dies and he writes letters to the universe – specifically to love, time, and death – and then the embodiments of love, time, and death visit him.
Except that’s a lie.
The trailers to this movie are deliberately lying to you about the plot, perhaps because the studio looked at the actual plot and decided it couldn’t sell it. That the actual plot was so wrong-headed and exploitative that they had to twist it, to hide the truth, to get anyone to see it.
The following is not a spoiler – this is revealed in the first 20 minutes of the film.
So here’s the actual plot: Will Smith’s daughter dies and he’s in a funk that’s starting to hurt the advertising company he owns. He writers three letters to love, time, and death in order to help heal. His three best friends are worried he’s hurting the company and he’s going to lose their best client (and future clients) unless he pulls out of this funk. So they hire a private investigator to follow him around. She steals the three letters from the US Post Office and reveals them to these friends. The friends then decide to hire three actors to play love, time, and death and have conversations with Smith that they secretly film. The friends then edit the footage to remove the actors so they can show the board of the ad company, proving that Will Smith is crazy so they can sell the company out from under him.
I reveal all this because the trailer is deliberately misleading and pretending it’s a kind of magical realism film or some kind of spiritual examination of life (love, time, and death). It’s not.
It IS about death and grief and love and dying and other stuff, just in different ways. It’s also a bunch of pseudo-profound hogwash and I’m saying that not as someone angry about the cynical manipulation of the trailers, but as someone who watched a stultifying self-righteous piece of pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo that thinks its saying something profound but really is not.
This is a pretty terrible movie and I wish I could say the actors save it. There’s a lot of good actors here – Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Pena, Helen Mirren, Keira Knightly, Naomi Harris, Ann Dowd, and Jacob Latimore – but none of them can save this terrible, manipulative script. A good actor can sometimes save bad material but not this time.
I will grant that the movie means well – it thinks its trying to say something profound about life, death, love, and loss but it’s so surface-level and fake on top of the batshit plot… it’s trying too hard and failing at every step. I was deadly bored and annoyed at nearly everything – just wishing it would get to the point, stop pretending its saying something interesting, and end.
There is one sub-plot that I kind of liked – each of the three terrible friends (Norton, Winslet, and Pena) have their own personal crisis that the actors help them with – and Norton’s plot involves his daughter who hates him after his divorce from her mom. They are kind of sweet together… but that’s about five minutes of the movie.
Avoid this hogwash.
In theory, some people may like it. They may be able to look past the legitimately awful people Smith’s “friends” are supposed to be and find something inspirational or meaningful in the “exploration” of life, death, etc. I don’t know how, but it’s possible that I’m just a grinchy old cynic. But I really enjoyed Manchester by the Sea which is a movie exploring a few of the same ideas, but it does it honestly and with real characters. Ugh.
Score: 58