Collateral Beauty

Release Date: December 16, 2016

Starring: Will Smith as Howard
Edward Norton as Whit
Kate Winslet as Claire
Michaell Pena as Simon
Helen Mirren as Brigitte/Death
Keira Knightley as Amy/Love
Jacob Latimore as Raffi/Time

Howard is a very successful advertiser in New York City. He if full of life and looks at it with great hope for the future. With this outlook on life he uses what everyone has in common to gear his advertising and these things are Love, Time, and Death. These things become ever more real to him after the lose of his six year old daughter. When he basically losses himself in the sorrow his friends are desperate to help him and hire a private eye to see what he does and if there is anything hey can do. They find that he is writing letters to Love, Death, and Time to ask the universe why this had to happen to him and his family. They wind up hiring actors to play these roles to help him come to terms with what has happened and why. However, his friends get more then they bargained for when they end up dealing with their own issues with Love, Death, and Time.

Critics are stupid... sometimes... most of the time. When the film came out everyone in every aspect hated this film and I am not sure why. Well, I am sure why because they said why in their reviews but I think they totally missed the point of the film.  Let me give you one example. One of these critics said that they thought that the film was about rich people getting their way. The only reason at all that money was as issue in the movie was the fact that the friends hired the actors at $20,000 dollars a piece. Ok, I get that I get that only the rich could go to that extreme to help a friend. However, that was not something I was worried about mainly because if I had that kind of money and I thought that anything was going to work to help a friend I would have gladly paid that price and I think many other of us would too.

Besides the point of the film is to not only help Howard with the loss of his child but it was for us as an audience to see what we are afraid of. Everyone is worried about Love, Death, and Time. I am 25 and I am worried about all of them. I always feel I don't have enough time to do all the things in life I want to do, and I want to have love in my life and that has not happened yet, and I am at this age where people in my family are dying. I getting to an age where all of this is around me and I can't make time stand still to fix it, or adjust stuff, I have to keep going forward and pray I don't waste time that I have worrying. These are three very big, and universal things that everyone does have to deal with in their lives. It may not be in the same way, or at the same time, but we all deal with them.

I think that the critics got to caught up in how "unrealistic" it was. That the actors could have never pulled off what they did to help Howard. I think the point that they missed was a simple point. The point was that everyone grieves for a loss differently. Some work through the grief, others cry and compose their selves. Personally I have gone through a lot of grief this year and I cried a lot and then went to a movie to calm myself down and process. The point of the movie was to understand that heartache is a very real thing and it doesn't go away overnight. The pain that we feel will lessen with time but we can't speed it up. Also, that even though we are grieving in different ways does not mean that we have lost touch with the world and people around us. We might not be able to convey that we still see, know, and might be more in tuned with what is going on in others lives than you may think. The movie was not only about how people deal with grief but how they are now changed by it.

It's a beautifully told story about this one man's journey and how his life has changed. However, it is every bit as poignant to everyone who watches it as it is to the characters in it. It's not your typical story of these "angels" or "beings" that come along to help a man through in some fairytale. The story is of real people helping a real man to process and start to heal from a major loss. It's not a typical story but it is one movie that has the most realistic and truest feelings of any I have ever seen.

This is one of Will Smith's best performances that I have seen him in. He really brings the best he has to the table in this film. No one would have been better for this film. He makes me forget that he is Will Smith and that he did other films. Any actor that can make you forget who they are and become a different person is a great actor in my book.