With a cast line up like this, how could you possibly pass it up? Luckily I had some free time on my hands because of my annual weeklong leave from work so I got to see it right after they declared that the Metro Manila Film Fest had closed.   The trailer looked like your standard Hollywood cheesy fare but it had Edward Norton in it so I was very much intrigued.

Here’s my roundup of David Frankel’s (The Devil Wears Prada (2006)) Collateral Beauty.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

Whit Yardshaw (Edward Norton – Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)), Claire Wilson (Kate Winslet – Insurgent (2015)), Simon Scott (Michael Peña – Ant-Man (2015)) and Howard Inlet (Will Smith – Suicide Squad (2016)) are all senior partners of a successful advertising firm and have been friends for a long time. Their personal and professional relationship gets tested when Howard, after losing his young daughter to cancer, spirals down the deep end. He refuses to listen to his partners and refuses as well to make any decisions about the company despite being the majority stock holder, driving the company to near ruin. Howard’s depression has caused many of their clients to pull out, leaving Whit, Claire and Simon to resort to drastic measures to try and save their company.

The trio hires a private investigator to follow Howard and gather evidence of him not being in the right frame of mind to be in charge. In doing so they find that Howard, who is still very much deep in grief, has been sending out letters to Death, Love and Time. The trio uses this information and they hire struggling actors Brititte (Helen Miren – Red 2 (2013)), Amy (Kiera Knightley – The Imitation Game (2014)) and Raffi (Jacob Latimore – The Maze Runner (2014)) to play the roles of Death, Love and Time respectively. They task the actors to confront Howard in the hopes of getting enough evidence of him being all cuckoo and probably also jump-start his moving on process.

THE GOOD:

1. Will Smith because he hardly had any lines in this thing but he conveyed all of the grief just with his eyes. I’ll admit it: I cried in this movie, but only during the times when Will Smith’s Howard was lashing out in the universe for taking his little girl away.

   

2. Everybody else in the cast pretty much was exceptional. Performances were good all around, as expected, and it surprised me that they all bounced off each other so well. I don’t know why, but I guess I was kind of expecting one of them to ham it up.

   

3. It was formulaic but hot damn, they followed that formula down to the last letter. I understand why critics would hate this movie – I get it that it’s basically a rehash of all successful Hollywood movies that came before it – BUT in the film’s defense, formulas are formulas for a reason. They work. And if done correctly, as is in the case of this movie, the end product is something good.

THE BAD:

1. Claire, Whit and Simon are dicks. Say what you will, but what they did is a horrible thing. Setting up your life long friend and making him think that he’s crazy while he’s undergoing the process of grieving for his dead daughter? That’s nasty.

   

2. First world problems, y’all. While it is refreshing to watch a movie where no one is a struggling millennial, it was also difficult for me personally to relate to the problems. They’re all just so successful – Claire who was successful at work but is afraid that it might be too late for her to have a baby, Simon who was successful at work but is afraid of leaving his family with nothing, and Whit who was successful at work but is having difficulties relating to his daughter. I think I’ll watch this movie again after ten years and see if I can relate to their problems better, but the thirty-year old me just can’t.

   

THE UGLY:

1. What the frak does ‘Collateral Beauty’ even mean? They explained it in the movie but I still don’t understand what it’s about. It just sounds like some philosophical mumbo jumbo felt like it didn’t belong to the story’s context.   This is probably the main reason why critics would murder this movie: while they were able to show the devastating effects of grief, they kind of just skipped over the parts where Howard decides to heal and just plug in this weird concept of ‘collateral beauty’. It’s a shame because I think that they built a pretty strong foundation for a pretty epic catharsis but it felt like they chickened out last minute.
2. The ambigious ending. I personally would have preferred it if Brigitte, Amy and Raffi were just your run of the mill struggling actors instead of hinting that they were actually Death, Love and Time. I don’t think that the movie needed any element of the supernatural because grief is such a fundamental human thing.
3. The Madeleine twist. In my eyes it was an unnecessary twist because it just makes Howard more of an asshole. Sure, he lost his kid but he’s not the only one who did and him being all weird and stalker-y towards his ex wife just highlighted the fact that he’s being a selfish prick.

   

All in all, Frankel’s Collateral Beauty was a film that I liked. It was formulaic, true, but I think it hit enough of the emotional high notes to make it okay. While the story is just about first worlders doing something horrible to their grieving friend (who admittedly is being a dick), performances were great all around that you almost forget that they’re basically screwing someone over. A lot of critics hated this, but Will Smith and his uber expressive eyes got me.

THE VERDICT: 7/10 because I am a sucker for grief stories.

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.