Collateral Beauty

There are two movies at your local theater right now dealing with grief over the death of a loved one.  One of them is Manchester by the Sea.  It's powerful, kind of brilliant, and features a career-topping performance by Casey Affleck.  The other is Collateral Beauty.  It features an all-star cast, many of them previous Oscar nominees or winners, but nobody is giving this their all.  Maybe it's because they knew how ludicrous the film was while they were making it.  This is a wannabe tearjerker that just doesn't try nearly hard enough.

For a movie that wants to tug at the heartstrings, this is a strangely lifeless affair.  There's so little energy to the performances and the storytelling that it turns into a slog.  We wait for the inevitable big dramatic scenes that are supposed to have us reaching for the Kleenex, and when they come, there's not a moist eye in the house, because everything just seems so perfunctory.  Even the settings seem underused.  The movie is set in Manhattan at Christmas time.  Anyone who has been there during the holidays can tell you that there is nothing quite like it.  However, if your only experience were to be this movie, it would seem lifeless and dull.  None of the settings or seasonal trappings matter anyway.  This movie could have been set anywhere and at any time of year, and it wouldn't change a single thing.

The plot: In the opening scene, we are introduced to Howard (Will Smith), a fast-talking ad executive who teaches his fellow employees to embrace the ideas of Time, Death and Love in everything they do.  What Time, Death and Love have to do with the ad industry, I honestly don't know, but I digress.  Then we jump ahead to three years later, and Howard is morose and despondent.  He is grieving over the death of his six-year-old daughter, basically doesn't interact with anyone, rides recklessly down the streets of New York on his bike, and pretty much does nothing but set up overly elaborate domino displays in his office all day.  His three fellow ad execs, Whit (Edward Norton), Claire (Kate Winslet) and Simon (Michael Pena) are worried for their friend.  But they're more worried about how his current grief-stricken attitude is affecting their business, as company partners are starting to drop out.

They hire a private investigator to follow Howard around, hoping they can find something incriminating that will prove he is not in his right mind, and that they can fire him.  Isn't that a lovely thought?  What the investigator finds is that Howard has started writing angry letters addressed to "Time", "Death", and "Love", demanding to know why they took his daughter away from him.  Unfortunately, this isn't a crazy enough idea for Howard to get fired over.  That's when Whit gets an idea.   They will hire three struggling theater actors, and have them pose as Time, Death and Love.  They will pretend that these ideals have somehow read his letters, and have now come to Earth to confront him.  Even more, they will hire the private investigator to film Howard having these conversations with these actors.  However, they will digitally remove the actors from the footage, so the tape will make it look like Howard is talking to himself.  That will convince the board of directors that Howard is crazy, he will get fired, and the company will be saved.  Yes.

So, three actors are hired to play the parts that will haunt Howard and make him think he's losing his mind.  They are Brigitte (Helen Mirren) playing Death, Amy (Keira Knightley) playing Love and Raffi (Jacob Latimore) playing Time.  They perform their roles, and force Howard to confront his own past and feelings, which leads to him to start going to a support group for parents who have lost their children.  So, you see?  It's a good thing that Howard's friends are trying to sabotage his career.  They're actually helping him come to terms with his own feelings!  But wait, it turns out that Whit, Claire and Simon all have their own grief that they have to deal with.  They get help, too.  By the time it's over, everybody's so full of good feelings, and the movie obviously wants us to be happy. 

But Collateral Beauty just doesn't earn any feelings, because it's just so tone deaf when it comes to emotion.  Will Smith plays Howard mostly like a zombie, dead eyed and completely devoid of feeling.  I can understand that grief can completely devastate a person and make them a shell of who they once were, but I think Smith takes it a bit too literally.  He's listless here, and does nothing to grab our attention.  As the three friends behind this whole harebrained scheme, Norton, Winslet and Pena have obviously decided to leave their usual on screen chemistry at home, and spend a lot of their scenes going through the motion.  The only performance that gets a response is Helen Mirren, who does add a spark of wit and intelligence to her role that the movie could have used a lot more of.  The movie comes the closest to working when she's on the screen, so you kind of wish that director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) had used her more.

It's clear that the filmmakers think they are making an uplifting Christmas movie here, but everything from the bizarre plotting to the off-kilter performances work against it.  It's also just not that emotional.  Anyone who knows me knows that I can be a big softy.  Heck, I choke back tears at those ASPCA commercials on TV with the sad-eyed puppies and kittens shivering in the cold or locked in cages.  But I did not come close even once to getting a lump in my throat here.  It's a total miscalculation.  Instead of sentimental, the movie just comes across as crass.  And when it wants to be thoughtful and tender, it's just kind of stupid.  I don't remember the last time a movie has been this out of touch with the emotions it wanted to inspire.

The French director Jean-Luc Godard was famous for saying that the way to criticize a movie is to make another movie.  Manchester by the Sea is the perfect criticism of Collateral Beauty.  It's honest, warm and uplifting - Everything that this one is not.

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