Collateral Beauty (2016)
Directed by David Frankel
Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.
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3 films that influenced Collateral Beauty
What critics say influenced Collateral Beauty
Not that this knockoff Hallmark special doesn’t go out of its way to camouflage its ill-conceived intentions as well as the considerable debt it owes to such seasonal chestnuts as “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Intended as a twinkling Christmastime fable, it’s actually a dark perversion of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that replaces divine intervention with corporate fraud, and small-town values with big-city ambition.
Imagine if in It’s a Wonderful Life Clarence hadn’t been an angel but an actor hired by Uncle Billy and then the whole town gathered to redecorate in an effort to convince George Bailey that he shouldn’t kill himself.
In Hollywood, that has led to films from Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life to A Charlie Brown Christmas and Elf.
Directed by David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and written by Allan Loeb (“21”), the dramedy aims to be a holiday-season uplift film with an otherworldly component, like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol.”
Despite the strange direction the plot takes, this is a film that goes with old school traditional values in the vein of movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, without driving the Christmas holiday or meaning down your throat.
Rather than take challenging roles and work with top-tier directors, Smith seems content to coast on overwrought dramas like Collateral Beauty, Seven Pounds, and The Pursuit of Happyness or playing charming smart-asses like with Suicide Squad and Focus.
It’s another in a long line of Will Smith weepers, not as notable as Seven Pounds or Pursuit of Happyness, but just as awful as his cameo as Satan spin in Akiva Goldman’s horrible Winter’s Tale .
But after Seven Pounds and now Collateral Beauty, even a Wild Wild West sequel is starting to sound good.
Smith is saddled with a scenario in "Collateral Beauty" that's as morose and ridiculous as the one in his 2008 weepie "Seven Pounds" — and, as then, he manages to make his character's suffering the one genuine part of the story.
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.
Rather than take challenging roles and work with top-tier directors, Smith seems content to coast on overwrought dramas like Collateral Beauty, Seven Pounds, and The Pursuit of Happyness or playing charming smart-asses like with Suicide Squad and Focus.
Seeing Smith play a failed father calls to mind the similarly heavy-handed “The Pursuit of Happyness,” the 2006 film that earned Smith an Oscar nomination that year.
Smith leads the ensemble by slipping into the same serious mode essayed in The Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds — and toying with many of the same themes and elements as well.
Pink-eyed, mopey and divorced from his usual charismatic stride, Smith is decidedly more “Seven Pounds” here than, say, “I Am Legend,” “The Pursuit Of Happyness,” “Concussion” or even “Suicide Squad.”