Collateral beauty movieshare2/3/2024 All three stalk Howard in public places, starting with Mirren’s Brigitte, who takes on the role of Death. The actors are played by a sprightly Helen Mirren, a saucy Keira Knightley, and a TV-gentle street-smart Jacob Latimore. How, exactly, will they manage that? By hiring a trio of actors from a local theater company to impersonate - you guessed it - Death, Love, and Time. And so, out of desperation more than disloyalty, the three decide to cut him out of the deal by recording evidence that he is mentally unsound. A company called OmniCom is offering $17 a share - but Howard won’t even have a conversation about it. They’ve decided to sell the faltering agency so they can receive a large payout, which each of them is in dire need of. He’d likely stay that way were it not for his trusty trio of executive partners, played by Edward Norton (divorced and broke, with a daughter who resents him), Kate Winslet (a workaholic who waited too long to start a family), and Michael Peña (who’s got one of those tell-tale coughs - ’nuff said). He won’t lead an existence that compromises it. He’s holding onto his grief because he’s holding onto his love. The message is that Howard can’t recover because his love is that pure and strong. He’s like the Olympic world champion of Holding It All Inside, and Smith - unlike, you know, Casey Affleck - doesn’t give off bitter waves of doubt or dysfunction. Yet there’s something undeniably a little Will Smithian about his suffering. He’s a zombie, a man who has left life utterly behind. He writes letters - not to other human beings, but to the spirits of Death, Love, and Time. He rides his bike against the New York traffic. Howard, we learn, lost his six-year-old daughter to cancer, and the agony imprisons and consumes him daily. The closest he comes to a constructive activity is setting up intricate arrays of multi-colored dominoes in his office, which he then lets topple as if to demonstrate an existential law: Whatever you create is destined to come falling down. Smith’s Howard, now haggard and morose, with thinning gray hair, has stopped talking to anyone. The movie opens with Will Smith, in vintage Will Smith mode - brash, ageless, a superhero of confidence - giving a motivational speech to the New York advertising agency he owns and presides over, but then, moments later, the image of Smith literally melts three years ahead. By the end of “Collateral Beauty,” you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played. It feels like a Hollywood awards movie from 30 years ago, laced with the kind of four-hankie strategies - hugs, buckets of tears, New Age greeting-card sentiments - that “Manchester” transcended. That’s part of the miracle of “Manchester by the Sea.” It leads us through one man’s life of locked-in sorrow with a sculptured emotional elegance that is never false at the same time, the cathartic honesty of its journey allows the audience to touch a nerve of desolation and still breathe free. So it’s telling, in a way, that in an awards season that’s been tilting away from major-studio releases and toward independent works like “Manchester,” along comes “ Collateral Beauty,” the big soppy whimsical lump-in-the-throat commercial version of a drama of parental grief. The subject is rough - and beyond that, it has a vast potential for programmed pathos and fake sentiment. When his notes bring unexpected personal responses, he begins to understand how these constants interlock in a life fully lived and how even the deepest loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.It asks a lot of an audience to sit through a drama about a parent grieving over the loss of a child. While his concerned friends try desperately to reconnect with him, he seeks answers from the universe by writing letters to Love, Time and Death. When a successful New York advertising executive (Will Smith) suffers a great tragedy, he retreats from life.
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