COLLATERAL BEAUTY
Warner Bros
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: C+
Director: David Frankel
Written by: Allan Loeb
Cast: Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Michael Peña, Naomie Harris, Jacob Latimore, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren
Screened at: AMC Lincoln Square, NYC, 12/13/16
Opens: December 16, 2016
Children bury their parents. That’s the normal way. Parents are not supposed to bury their children, especially if the youths are alive barely old enough to know what life’s all about. So when Howard Inlet (Will Smith) suffers the loss of his six-year-old daughter to cancer, he exudes enough grief to, what? to turn the audience into a bucket of sniffles and make collateral money for Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex. Director David Frankel, whose “Marley and Me” is a soft and cuddly tale of lessons taught to a family by a neurotic dog, is out this time to deliver a more important, serious message. How to convince a distraught father to snap out of his funk, to get him back to the living and take him out of his melancholy routine of riding his bike, sitting in a dog park moping, and neither eating nor sleeping.
There’s not much comedy, unusual for a commercial movie around Christmas which, despite a feel-good ending can put an audience into a mild state of depression. But there is a look at the cruel machinations of people out for money who opt to secretly film Howard showing signs of a psychotic break, its snide focus reminiscent of the director’s “The Devil Wears Prada.” Howard is a part-owner of a major New York advertising company whose partners want to provide evidence that he is a mad men, but not the kind of man men that advertisers were called in the TV series. After Howard takes leave of work for two years, the company gets an offer to be bought out, but Howard, who must agree to sell, refuses to converse with the buyers and thereby holds onto his own shares. The partners, Whit Yardsham (Edward Norton), Simon Scott (Michael Peña) and Claire Wilson (Kate Winslet) devise a complex scheme. They will try to prove to the authorities that he is not in a psychologically fit condition to make a judgment on the proposed sale. The partners will then have the authority to sell off the company without Howard’s agreement.
After discovering that he is sending mail to three abstractions, Death, Love and Time, the partners hire three off-off- Broadway actors Aimee Moore (Keira Knightley) to play Love, Raffi (Jacob Latimore) to play Time, and Brigitte (Helen Mirren) to play Death. They three thespians stalk Howard pretending that they actually received his mail, that they are not human beings but sprites. To reveal more on how they prove Howard to be non compos mentis would be to expose spoilers, but suffice it to say that it’s not so much Howard who has problems, but the other partners, the ones who do the hiring of the actors, and that by solving the problems of all four—Howard, Whit, Simon and Claire—Frankel could devise a happy ending. The audience will then cry tears of joy and will abandon tears of sorrow.
The whole episode is lacking the kind of humor and organic, rather than forced, pathos, that made other, initially depressing, Christmas fare uplifting. Think of “The Bishop’s Wife” (Cary Grant as a guardian angel), and “It’s a Wonderful Life” (banker contemplates suicide and communicates with celestial bodies). The performances are fine: Will Smith, who can do no wrong, changes from a rah-rah charismatic force to an image of seemingly incurable depression; Edward Norton, is a divorced father whose daughter won’t talk to him; and Michael Peña faces an existential crisis that he hides from his family. Of the three would-be sprites, Helen Mirren is the most effective as “Death,” and Howard’s relationship to Madeleine (Naomie Harris) as a grief counselor who lost her own young child, is reasonably credible. There are spellbinding scenes of dominoes, a hundred or more, that no other movie can touch, their falling one after another to symbolize building up and destroying. And one scene of Manhattan skyscrapers at night is the most ravishing shot of the Big Apple I’ve seen. As for the title of the film, presumably after the most tragic of circumstances world goes on, beauty rears its head, and we can step out of our funk to appreciate what life still has to offer.
Rated PG-13. 94 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C-
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall C+
