Collateral Beauty is about a grieving man and his fellow business owners/alleged friends who try to intervene by hiring three actors to make him seem crazy so they can take, I mean, rescue the business from him because they care. Along the way, they learn valuable life lessons from these actors who play &/or are Love, Death and Time. Collateral Beauty is filled with a star-studded ensemble cast: Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Pena, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Naomie Harris, and a black kid, who is always angry, vaguely physically threatening, jokes about crack and called thug. Do not watch Collateral Beauty.
If you want a guide on how NOT to do magical realism, watch Collateral Beauty, which lacks the courage and consistency of that approach. Collateral Beauty maligns characters that you are supposed to sympathize with in order to make magical realism plausible, which is not how magical realism works. They are not the personifications of Love, Death and Time, BUT THEY ARE! I hate laziness. It is like making Bruce Almighty, but pretending that Morgan Freeman isn’t God, but a man playing God, and coincidentally inexplicable things happen, but then at the end of the film, the film reveals that he is God so it retroactively makes sense. Or it is like making Prometheus (yes, I’m still angry).
Collateral Beauty will make you yearn for the straightforward simplicity of Touched by An Angel, and the nuance and surprise plot twists of M. Night Shylaman’s The Village and Lady in the Water (to those unfamiliar with Shylaman’s work, those films were not his best or worst work). I saw all the cynical plot twists coming in Collateral Beauty, but stared in a mixture of horror and disbelief and thought, “Surely they are not going to do this. They did it.” The only twist that I did not see coming was the significance in the dominoes-eye roll.
Just when you think that Collateral Beauty cannot be more offensively contrived, the reveal about two characters’ relationship to each other, which I saw coming, made the movie irredeemably worse. At least magical realism is realistic and adheres to a certain logic. Collateral Beauty wants to have its cake and eat it too. Collateral Beauty wants his friends/colleagues to gaslight him, but also be kind. Collateral Beauty wants to be deeply significant, but pulls punches by flinching at its supernatural/spiritual ambitions. Collateral Beauty wants to be layered with meaning, but does not understand what is meaningful or realistic in the struggles about death or life. It does not mean having a convenient case of extremely partial amnesia, the province of daytime soap operas, and forgetting whom the mother of your child is then having her sketchily counsel you while rekindling your romance. Death focuses your memory, makes you obsess about every detail and become an amateur life detective. See The Attack, 45 Years, (especially) Biutiful or literally any Guillermo Del Toro film. If you absolutely can’t bear the honesty and bluntness of emotion provided in those films, Best Man Down gets more right than wrong.
My mother adores Will Smith and paid money to see Secondhand Lions. She hated Collateral Beauty. She is the embodiment of Collateral Beauty’s target audience. After Seven Pounds, she was ready to quit, but Concussion brought her back. Collateral Beauty has endangered mom’s must see Will Smith in a film rule. I also have a rule. Movies, like people, will tell you whom they are if you pay attention. Collateral Beauty does this two times. First, when Smith says, “It is all a bunch of intellectual bullshit,” and second, when Time says, “Maybe that was just bullshit, Claire. Maybe that was just acting.” Collateral Beauty is bullshit, and only Keira Knightley manages to imbue any real feeling in the film.
Collateral Beauty is a gross, emotional circle jerk that should have been called Touched by a Personification. Collateral Beauty lacked the bravery to truly embrace magical realism or the ability to tell a simple story about grief without making it a feel good story with no real emotion, just platitudes. Collateral Beauty is a waste of New York, talent and resources. Don’t let Collateral Beauty waste your time. Skip Collateral Beauty and watch A Christmas Carol or Groundhog Day.