Collateral Beauty
(2016)
(SPOILERS) Will Smith’s most recent attempt to take a
wrecking ball to his superstardom, Collateral
Beauty is one of those high concept emotional journeys that only look like
a bad idea all along when they flop (see Regarding
Henry). Except that, with a plot as gnarly as this, it’s difficult to see
quite how it would ever not have
rubbed audiences up the wrong way. A different director might have helped,
someone less thuddingly literal than David Frankel. When this kind of misguided
picture gets the resounding drubbing it has, I tend to seek out positives.
Sometimes, that can be quite easy – A Winter’s
Tale, for example, for all its writ-large flaws – but it’s a fool’s errand
with Collateral Beauty.
The last time Smith ventured into such bare-faced, turgidly
manipulative and indulgent territory was Seven
Pounds, a truly dreadful movie, possibly the nadir of his career (like
Bruce Willis before him, he seems content to leave fallow his greatest natural
skill as a performer: making people laugh). He fared better with the flagrantly
aspirant The Pursuit of Happyness.
This falls somewhere in between. While it isn’t dead set on charting a course
of personal grief-porn to its tragic end, it is nauseatingly keen to spoon out the life-affirming platitudes. Somehow,
the movie attracted an all-star cast, which adds to my ponderance that Frankel’s
tin eye deserves to cop some of the flack, albeit Allan Loeb has a track record
for shiny, exec-luring premises as well as soggy emotional uplift.
Loeb isn’t making matters easy in the sympathy stakes off
the bat, asking us to invest in the survival of that most unworthy of
industries, advertising. He might as well have Smith’s Howard Inlet (Inlet?) presiding
over a collapsing bank and expect us not to cheer on its demise. We’re told, in
all seriousness (as far as I could divine) “Advertising
is about illuminating how our products and services will improve people’s lives”.
And there I was, thinking it was about brainwashing people into buying things
they don’t need or even want in the name of the god that is materialism.
Alas, poor Howard suffers a terrible tragedy soon after,
losing his daughter. You can tell this has a terrible effect on him as he turns
all grey and stubbly, taking to setting up ridiculously expansive domino
arrangements that he then topples, to the accompaniment of a heartstring-pulling
soundtrack. Howard has also taken to sending symbolic letters to Love, Time and
Death, berating them for putting him through the same grindler they put most
people on the planet through at some point. This is, after all, a Hollywood
movie, where people do and feel things in an alternate reality, so sending
letters to abstract forces is the kind of thing that gets applauded as a red-hot
idea and even encourages bidding wars. Did I mention it’s set at Christmas? How
could it fail?
Probing tomes on Howard’s writing desk such as The Hidden Reality and Journey of the Souls suggest a
philosophical underpinning to Collateral
Beauty that simply doesn’t exist. One assumes Loeb either read the blurbs
and decided “Nah” or Frankel’s prop department were far more enlightened than
those calling the shots. There’s a point where I thought the picture might be
promoting the idea of equivocal perceptions of reality – when Whit (Edward
Norton, in an entirely thankless part) notes that his relationship with his
mentally-ailing mother improved when he stopped trying to “force your reality onto her, and just go into her reality”, that no
one person’s is any more valid than another’s – but it isn’t doing that either.
Rather, Loeb is serving up gloopy portions of schmaltz with
zero attentiveness to shame and decency. Before Whit comes up with the deranged
scheme of hiring actors to play Death (Helen Mirren), Love (Keira Knightley)
and Time (Jacob Latimore), in order to have Howard pronounced mentally unfit when
they are digitally erased from recorded footage, leaving him talking to air (likely
as not to push him completely over the edge, resulting in him going mad or
killing himself, should he buy into it at all), he comments that they tried
everything: grief counsellors, ayahuasca and interventions. The middle one’s
supposed to be a gag, but Frankel, who previously savaged eyeballs with Marley & Me, fumbles pretty much
every would-be witty line, just as he torpedoes the emotional ones.
Lest you think this is all about Will, he actually has no
more screen time (admittedly, I didn’t do any precise calculations) than his
co-workers, Whit, Claire (Kate Winslet) and Simon (Michael Pena), who have maudlin
trials of their own to face. Actually, that’s unfair. Whit and Claire have
really ropey trials – he, as a philanderer whose daughter has rejected him, must
reconnect; she is facing having missed out on motherhood – but Simon’s is
rather affecting, so much so that it ought to have merited Howard receiving a
good slap for being so self-indulgent while one of his friends is dying from
cancer. When Brigitte/Death tells Simon, who has kept the prognosis from his
family, “You are not dying right. You’re
not helping them”, it’s one of the few lines in the screenplay that land,
although the credit is largely due to Mirren and Pena. Other lines, like the
gibberish “There is no such thing as
collateral beauty” fail to amount to anything even when they’re laboriously
explained.
The reveal (although it’s heavily signposted from their
first scene) that the actors actually are
these universal forces is presumably supposed to make the deception of Howard
all right (and anyway, pains have been made to make it clear that, even though
what they’re doing is entirely motivated by money, Whit, Claire and Simon
really do care about their
boss/partner). Being charitable, I might allow that something could be done
with an idea like this – minus the nefarious colleagues – given a poetic makeover by, say, Wim Wenders,
rather than engineered by someone whose fall-back for any given emotional outpouring
is the a music montage.
I doubt the misconceived twist that Howard’s grief support
group counsellor (Naomie Harris) is, in fact, his wife could have worked with
anyone, though, since it requires a switch of levers; it’s an intellectual
device, a “clever” plot thing, rather than providing a cathartic moment. Still,
it appears to do the trick as far as waking Will up is concerned, and he isn’t
even consequently pissed off at his unscrupulous fellow workers.
You wonder, with a movie like this, if it might be some sort
of test designed to register the limits of what audiences find morally
acceptable. That, in an “ends justify the means” sense, all manner of
objectionable behaviour gets the tacit nod of approval. If so, it’s just as
well it flopped. As such, that my rating isn’t lower reflects that I found Collateral Beauty morbidly diverting, fascinating
for the depths to which it is willing to stoop.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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