Collateral Beauty opens with a speech. Will Smith, as the New York advertising executive Howard Inlet, tells his staff to get through the day by keeping three ideas in mind: Love, Time, Death. Three years later, Howard is clinically depressed after his young daughter dies. He stops sleeping and eating, builds domino chains at the office, and writes letters to the three abstractions he once praised. The film that follows is a 97-minute drama directed by David Frankel from a script by Allan Loeb, and it is a wreck.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Howard Inlet Stops Coming to Work
The setup sounds like it could carry a movie. Howard’s grief has cost his firm high-profile clients and left the company near bankruptcy. As majority shareholder, he blocks any sale. His estranged partners — Edward Norton as Whit Yardsham, Kate Winslet as Claire Wilson, Michael Peña as Simon Scott — decide he is unfit to run the business and hire a private investigator, Sally Price, to prove it.
Sally intercepts the letters Howard mailed to Love, Time and Death and hands them over. The partners then hire three struggling actors to pose as the abstracts and confront Howard in person. Keira Knightley plays Amy, Jacob Latimore plays Raffi, Helen Mirren plays Brigitte. Sally films the encounters, then digitally erases the actors so Howard looks unhinged.
That is the engine of Collateral Beauty. A dead child, a hostile takeover, and a scheme to gaslight a grieving man into a psychiatric diagnosis using paid performers and doctored video. The film presents this as a rescue.
Amy, Raffi and Brigitte Meet Their Marks
Each actor spends time with the partner who hired them, and each partner carries a private problem. Simon is secretly battling cancer. Whit cheated on his daughter Allison’s mother and cannot connect with the pre-teen. Claire is looking for sperm donors to conceive a child. The film wants these threads to rhyme with Howard’s letters, so that Love, Time and Death turn out to be lessons for everyone.
We are all connected
That tagline is the whole thesis, printed on the poster. On screen it plays as a threat. The three actors are not supernatural visitors and the film never pretends otherwise. They are employees, paid to deceive a sick man, and the movie asks us to find meaning in the con rather than in the man it is being run on.
A Cast That Cannot Save the Script
The ensemble is the reason anyone bought a ticket. Smith, Norton, Winslet, Knightley, Mirren, Peña and Naomie Harris, who plays Madeleine, are not the problem. The problem is that Loeb’s script gives them speeches about interconnection and expects the cast to sell it. Mirren, as Brigitte, is the only performer who seems to know what film she is in — she plays Death like a woman who has read the pages and decided to have some fun anyway.
Everyone else is stranded. Norton’s Whit is a bad father with a redemption arc bolted on. Winslet’s Claire wants a baby because the plot needs a third lesson. Peña’s Simon has cancer because the plot needs stakes the letters cannot supply. None of it interlocks. The film keeps saying the three concepts do, and saying it is not the same as showing it.
Love, Time and Death as a Business Plan
Strip the sentiment and Collateral Beauty is a movie about corporate governance. Howard owns the most shares. His partners want him declared incompetent so they can sell. The letters are evidence. The actors are the trap. The grief support group Howard attends, where he meets Madeleine, exists to give him somewhere to heal so the partners’ scheme can be forgiven.
The film never reckons with what they did. Sally’s erased footage is a fabrication designed to strip a man of his company and his standing, and the ending treats it as a roundabout act of love. That is not a twist. It is a moral vacuum with a string score over it.
2.3 of 10
Collateral Beauty premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival on December 13, 2016, and opened in the United States on December 16. It grossed $88 million worldwide against a net $36 million budget, which means it made its money back. That is the least interesting fact about it.
What matters is that the film takes a real subject — a father destroyed by his daughter’s death — and builds a caper around it, then asks the audience to cry at the caper. Every emotional beat is unearned because the plot has already told us the emotions are staged. The actors cast as Love, Time and Death are actors. The tears are performances. The film knows this and thinks we will not notice.
We notice. The score is 2.3 of 10.
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