![]() Shot in glossy widescreen by Maryse Alberti, the movie makes great use of New York locations, covering a variety of neighborhoods and capturing the city’s iconic features without resorting to postcard images. Audiences who enjoy smiling through tears, and don’t mind having their buttons pushed in the most obvious ways, could probably do a lot worse. To Loeb’s credit, he refrains from tying everything up too neatly, and his overdetermined screenplay does keep a semi-surprising reveal or two up its sleeve. The ensuing developments become predictable, as Howard is revealed to be far more intuitive than he appears, and naturally, personal breakthroughs of several shades occur. The explanation of the movie’s title is just another example of how it substitutes trite greeting-card wisdom for psychological insight. That means the anger in these scenes is all surface, no depth, largely because the script continues merely to display bereavement rather than explore it in more challenging ways. The mood then darkens as Love, Time and Death each make a second appearance, causing him to erupt into soliloquies of rage about the empty platitudes meant to comfort him.ĭrawn against her better judgment into the charade, Amy (as Love) responds in earnest to Howard’s hashtag-friendly question from the start of the movie, shouting, “I am the only why!” Faux-profound statements like that one, unfortunately, are about as illuminating as it gets. It’s a ludicrous plot device, right out of Gaslight, as Brigitte observes, but at least it gives the film some fresh spark as Frankel plays the three actors’ initial encounters with Howard for funny-sad comedy. ![]() Howard also writes letters to - you’ve seen the trailer so you know - Love, Time and Death. Whit hires a private investigator (the great Ann Dowd, underused), who discovers that Howard sits at home alone with no phone or internet goes nowhere aside from a Brooklyn dog park, despite having no dog and gazes through a window at a therapy group for grieving parents run by Madeline ( Naomie Harris), though he never ventures in. All of their plotlines are more absorbing than Howard’s. And Simon, the comic relief, is a proud new dad nursing a burdensome secret concerning his health. Kind-hearted Claire has focused on her career and ignored her biological clock for so long she may have left motherhood too late. Cynical Whit’s philandering killed his marriage and alienated his daughter (Kylie Rogers), who rolls her eyes and sneers, “I’ve already seen it,” when he tells her he got them Hamilton tickets for Christmas. The movie somehow dances around the pain-for-gain callousness of that scheme by showing Whit, Claire and Simon to be each trapped in his or her own unhappy situation, thus rendering them all ripe for epiphanies later on. Will Smith, Naomie Harris Explain the Relief of Grief at 'Collateral Beauty' Premiere So as much as they care about their friend and colleague, they maneuver to have him declared incompetent. The other partners are in a jam, as major clients start bailing and investors lose faith. It’s now two years since the death of Howard’s six-year-old daughter, and he has returned to work in body if not in spirit or mind. That image recurs with tireless insistence throughout the movie. ![]() Ditto the staff of millennial hipsters and Howard’s partners, Whit ( Edward Norton), Claire (Kate Winslet) and Simon (Michael Pena).Ĭut to three years later and one not-so-subtle visual metaphor for total collapse - an elaborate, multi-lane domino structure toppled with the flick of a single tile. Howard even gets a little misty-eyed at his own marketing-guru genius. Smith plays Howard, an advertising wizard hailed at his Soho firm as the “resident poet-philosopher of product.” First seen giving a celebratory talk to his associates and employees to cap off the agency’s most successful year ever, Howard identifies the core question of his profession: “What is your why?” While he’s no Don Draper, he kind of explains what that adspeak might mean by pointing to Love, Time and Death as the three abstracts that connect every human on the planet.
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