‘Collateral Beauty’: Many Reviews Suggest Movie Is An Exercise In Manipulation
“You probably have heard about Collateral Beauty, the movie where a man loses his only daughter to the deathly pangs of cancer and is visited by the personifications of Time, Love, and Death; and you thought it will make for a great watch. Well, the many movie review wonks out there who have seen it all have a different opinion about it.
The movie Collateral Beauty captures the life of a man caught in the throes of grief and sorrow. Howard, played by Will Smith, is a successful New York ad executive who not only enjoys selling ads but also sees his job as a platform for building connections, a belief he gladly shares with his co-workers. When he loses his 6-year-old daughter to cancer, he retreats into his shell and loses interest in life.
As a result of the grief, Smith is found doing strange things like creating elaborate, multi-colored dominoes which he then allows to fall; or writing letters to strange recipients, in this case, the abstract triad of Death, Time, and Love. The effect of this on Howard is that he can’t pay optimum attention and required mental bandwidth to the business, which is now struggling. However, his partners – the trio of Edward Norton, Michael Pena, and Kate Winslet – have decided to sell the now-deficient company to a buyer willing to pay $17 per share. But only if Howard, the major shareholder, is mentally capable of holding a conversation of such nature and penning his signature.
To have their way and get their payout, which they so badly need, they try to gain evidence of Howard’s mental incapacity. They hire three actors to personify his three abstract recipients – Death, Love, and Time. The endgame is to tape Howard’s speech so as to have an evidence for the “mentally-unsound” claims that will be the key in their pecuniary goal or to get his agreement.
The Reviews
Many movie commentators and critics have offered their opinions on the movie. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times doesn’t have a high opinion of the movie because he was in his “anger” mood when reviewing the movie.
“The five stages of grief sometimes seem applicable to movie reviewing, except that I usually skip denial, rarely get around to acceptance and generally just settle into anger, which is where I am with ‘Collateral Beauty.'”
As a result of this, “Many of the words that I would like to use to describe this waste of talent and time,…..So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.”
Dargis’ anger and his use of words are due to the lack of a real moment in the movie, whether in the emotions expressed in the movie or some components of the setting.
“It’s hard to choose just one barb given that there is not a single real or honest moment in this movie, beginning with the opener.”
“It seems unlikely that any director could convincingly transform this much plastic into something resembling reality.”
Owen Gleiberman, Chief Film Critic at Variety, expresses a similar feeling of inauthenticity.
“A decade ago, in ‘The Pursuit of Happyness,’ Smith proved he had the stuff to make a down-and-out character stingingly authentic, but in ‘Collateral Beauty,’ when he gets all red-rimmed and teary, it feels like the actor’s showcase it is, because the film’s whole experience of suffering is engineered.”
Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic opines that the movie’s message – that grief can be beautiful- is empty and bland.
“Collateral Beauty is a movie that insists grief can be beautiful. In the service of this extraordinarily bland, empty message, it takes the subject most likely to provoke an emotional response—the death of a child—and treats it cheaply, employing pseudobabble, chicken-soup-for-the-soul platitudes, and naked manipulation to tug at its audience’s heartstrings.”
Stephanie Zacharek of the Time Magazine and Emily Yoshida at Vulture both express similar sentiments while Todd VanDerWerff of Vox calls it the dumbest movie before the buzzer. Zacharek avers that, “Pinpointing one fatal flaw in Collateral Beauty is impossible—the transgressions pile up like a trash heap of Christmas miracles.”
Movie reviewers dislike Collateral Beauty for the fact that it is inauthentic, unrealistic, and has a bland message. You can see the trailer below.
[Featured Image By XPX/STAR MAX/IPx]
