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Directed by David Frankel and written by Allan Loeb, Collateral Beauty isthe story of Howard (Will Smith), a man struggling to cope with his daughter's death. In an attempt to "help" him, his coworkers (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Peña) contrive a plan to make Howard seem mentally unfit for work so that they can secure a major account at their ad agency. And -- act one spoiler here -- they hire actorsto approach him as Love, Time and Death, the three abstractions which, in a brief flashback, he tells us "connect every human being on Earth."

"We long for love, we wish we had more time, we fear death," Howard says. Then he writes it on the chalkboard, underlines it, and asks if there are any questions from the class (he doesn't, but the pedantry is real).

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Three years after that stock scene, Howard is a shell of his former self -- he's aged significantly, he barely speaks, and he spends much of his time in the office building massive, elaborate domino displays to drive home his "What's the point" philosophy. We learn that his daughter passed away due to illness, and that the people who allegedly care about him waited three years to say or do anything.

The central conflict of Collateral Beauty is supposed to be Howard facing and coping with his grief, and instead it's presented to us as a burden to his coworkers, who want the reigns of the ad agency. That's a hard sell when we barely know the company, and when their de facto leader Whit (Norton) is a dispassionate stock character who says things like "Just push the papers, Simon."

In many ways Collateral Beautysets itself up for failure by trying to tackle the immensity of love, time and especially death all at once. 2016 was a year of death, which means that this, of all years, is the worst time to approach the theme lightly, glibly or with anything less than full and undivided attention to nuance.

The first act inexplicably presents itself as a comedy, an outdated sitcom with all the sensitivity of a blunt axe. By the time the climax and finale pivot to pure pain and suffering, you'll be numb to the insincerity of it all.

Not for the first time this year, Smith is better than his movie. His grief is ugly and palpable, but lost among the abundant excess plaguing Collateral Beauty.

We're given a rushed assurance that his alleged friends in the workplace have tried to help Howard, but that he "terrorized" the grief counselor and now they're losing important accounts.

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They hire a private investigator to follow him (The Leftovers' Ann Dowd), a P.I. who has no qualms during her first day on the job about breaking into a federal mailbox. It bears asking why our characters don't ever stop and check themselves: "Hey guys, is the Omnicom account worth this?"

Howard's stolen letters are addressed to Love, Time and Death. There is never any reference to him having written previous letters, so we have to accept that the P.I. conveniently caught him on the most pivotal possible day. Shortly thereafter, Whit crosses paths with Amy (Keira Knightley), an actor visiting the office for an audition and practically chases her several blocks back to a theater because she improved ad copy by using active voice in a sentence.

This gives Whit the perverse idea to hire Amy and her fellow actors Brigitte (Helen Mirren) and Raffi (Jacob Latimore) to approach Howard as Love, Time and Death, to converse with him and fix him or make him look so unhinged that he has to be let go. Because it's the goddamned Omnicom account at stake, Claire and Simon agree. It's hard to swallow the insensitivity. When the actors start interacting with Howard and feel the rush of performance it's nothing short of sick.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Collateral Beauty is weighed down in innumerable ways. The dialogue drags, from the corporate buzzwords to platitudes about life and grief which even Our Lord and Savior Helen Mirren can't redeem. As if being plunged into a film where a dead child is a plot device isn't jarring enough, we're expected to sympathize with Whit, Claire and Simon, all of whom have their own fraught relationships with love, time and death (respectively) in more of the film's heavy-handed theming.

The film might have benefited from more time spent in the past, getting to know Howard at his best and the relationships he had with Whit, Claire and Simon -- relationships we see no evidence of in the present because they take a backseat to this amateur-level philosophy course.

Howard confides in a woman he meets at a bereavement support group (Naomie Harris), and their interactions are entirely inappropriate for where and how they've met (much like his colleagues and their thespian charges). This is a subplot meant to teach us the value of space, of separating oneself from trauma before returning to embrace its legacy, but like the rest of the film's redundant plot, it's robbed of the necessary care. By the end it's twisted and gnarled into an outright gimmick.

The film constantly undermines audience intelligence, emotional or otherwise; The P.I. records Howard on video in portrait mode and then the footage is horizontal and high enough resolution to play on 40-inch flat screen TVs. (It's also heavily doctored, because who doesn't have Hollywood VFX tech on their smartphone?) For people scrambling to secure their salaries, Howard's misguided colleagues are awfully frivolous with money, offering the actors $20,000 apiece; Whit's libido even promises Amy $1 million after they land the cash cow that is Omnicom.

Late in the film, Brigitte, drunk with the self-importance of portraying death, tells a dying manthat "Nothing's ever really dead if you look at it right." I don't know what happened next because I stabbed my notebook and threw it across the room and now I may be indefinitely banned from the theater.

The title comes from a conversation with Howard's support group companion, Madeleine, describing the death of her own young daughter. There was an unknown woman at the hospital that night (ooh, mysterious) who told her to notice the "collateral beauty" of life after death. It's hard to imagine the mother of a dying child accepting this as more than flowery words, but she does.

Unfortunately, we see no evidence of collateral beauty in the film. Howard is surrounded by apathy and manipulation as well as poor writing and haphazard intention that never translate on screen. Fortunately for us as viewers, the collateral beauty of this sloppy film is the other magnificent work in theaters, artistic and emotional films about love, time and death that actually deserve your attention. This is not one of them.

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