new to DVD: Collateral Beauty

Imagine this scenario if you will: A good man builds a company from the ground up. He's an insightful businessman and inspirational leader, and treats his employees with affection and respect. He takes three of those employees under his wing. They all become friends. He gives them stakes in the company.

Then, one day, tragedy strikes: The Good Man's daughter has died. The Three Employees act supportive and understanding, and talk a great deal about their friendship, and how much they're concerned for the Good Man. But secretly, the Three Employees decide that the Good Man's grief is inconvenient. They conspire to arrange a hostile take-over of the company. They do this in a particularly insidious manner, by stealing his mail so that they can learn his secrets, and then hiring a whole team of specialists to manipulate the Good Man's grief and sorrow to the breaking point. Then, the plan goes, when the Good Man has been completely broken and shows evidence of outright insanity -- evidence which the Three Employees are perfectly willing to fake if the Good Man proves too resilient to fall on his own -- they will present said evidence at a board meeting as proof that the Good Man is no longer fit to run the company. He's out, they get to run the company as they see fit.

Now, imagine someone so clueless that, after carefully considering every aspect of this scenario, he looks up and says, "so the Three Employees who are trying to destroy the Good Man and steal his company -- they're the good guys, right?"

That clueless man is no hypothetical. He's Allan Loeb, the screenwriter for Collateral Beauty. The Good Man in question is Howard, played by Will Smith, and the devious/ allegedly sympathetic Three Employees are Claire, Simon, and Whit, played, respectively, by Kate Winslet, Michael Pena, and Edward Norton.

That's a good cast, but even they can't sustain the ludicrous moral reversal that Loeb demands of their characters, expecting them to come across as nice people even as they work to ruin Howard's already ruined life even further. Loeb and his actors try to sell the idea that they have Howard's best intentions at heart by giving us a lot of concerned/ guilty/ sad looks on their faces, and a lot of dialogue in which Howard's alleged friends talk about how much they love him, and try to justify their actions by theorizing, unconvincingly, "maybe this is just the exact kind of wake-up call he needs" to get him out of his grief. Come on. If at this point, you're reading, and thinking, "well, I guess, maybe they have a point," go back up a few paragraphs and re-read what these people are doing to poor Howard. These people are monsters, and their love of Howard makes their actions more, not less monstrous.

There's one other extremely central plot point to this movie. Whit's plan (for he, as Howard's junior partner and alleged "best friend," is the leader of the Three Employees' attempt to crush their benefactor) is so odd that it strains this film's already paper-thin credibility even further. Whit has learned that Howard has, as a therapeutic exercise, written letters to the concepts of Death, Love, and Time. So Whit decides to hire three actors to approach Howard, pretending to be the personifications of Death, Love, and Time. They'll be convincing, Whit reasons, because the actors will be armed with private information that they "couldn't possibly know," after reading Howard's mail.

The contrast between the actors is one of the very few actually interesting aspects of the story. Raffi/Time is only interested in the fact that Whit's offer is a paying job. Briggite/Death is excited about the unique challenge to the craft of acting, and after a brief initial objection to the ethics of the assignment, very quickly reverses her moral stance on the matter, and becomes entirely convinced that Whit's reasoning is right, that this is ultimately all for Howard's own good. Amy / Love strenuously objects to the nature of the assignment, repeatedly pointing out the horrific nature of what they're all doing to Howard, and the hypocrisy of Whit's claims of friendship and love for Howard even as he devotes his time and money to further tearing the broken guy apart. Yes, she repeatedly, strenuously objects -- but she still takes the job, even after emphatically explaining "it's not about the money!"

Well then why do it? If she's not intrigued by the challenge, like Brigitte, or motivated by money, like Raffi, and she so strongly objects, then why do it? The movie strongly hints that her real motivation is that she has developed an instant crush on Whit, but this is as unconvincing as the rest of the story. They've only just met, and the only real thing Amy knows about Whit is that he's basically a horrible person whose actions disgust her. The sorta-love story between them is never really explored, which saves Loeb from having to explain what the heck she sees in him, but leaves her motivation for accepting the job completely, unsatisfactorily, unexplained.

What's really maddening about all of this is Loeb came so very, very close to coming up with a truly interesting idea for this movie that you want to cry out, "why didn't you do it the other way, why, WHY?!?"

What if, instead of being visited by three low-rent actors hired by friends trying to drive him insane (sorry, I still can't get past that ridiculous concept), Howard was actually visited by personifications of Death, Love, and Time? Think about all the ground that could explore! It could work as a comedy, as a drama, as a fantasy, as an intellectual, cinematic-philosophical treatise on what those concepts mean to us in our lives, or even as some fantastic, inspired combination of all of the above!

But no. Loeb instead decided to treat us with this convoluted scenario, and expected us to fall in platonic love with Howard's so-called friends just because, yeah, they're trying to drive him insane and steal his company, but gosh-darn it, they feel awfully bad about it, so they must be good people!

A couple of more nit-picks. Howard is black. His best friend who's trying to ruin his life is a white guy named Whit. Make of that what you will, but in a movie that never touches on race for even a moment -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- but the unintended symbolism just smacks you in the face. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of names out there, Norton's character is named "Whit"? And Loeb doesn't see the issue with this? Really?

Also, the ending. The movie throws not just one, but two twist endings at you, in a movie that, thematically and tonally, doesn't really cry out for a twist ending at all. But those twists, man. They make you say, "ohhh!" for maybe a second or two, but then you immediately say, "wait a minute!" because the twists basically fly in the face of everything that has preceded them. The twists are ultimately nonsensical, unearned, and completely unnecessary.

Allan Loeb is a writer I've long considered under-appreciated, ever since he created the fun, intriguing, highly under-rated fantasy-police drama hybrid New Amsterdam. I've admired Allan Loeb as a writer. This movie made me completely reverse that opinion.