This post contains spoilers for the movie “Collateral Beauty.”
I have rarely gotten as many emails about a story as I did over the weekend in response to a blog post I wrote about the holiday movie “Collateral Beauty.” I felt like the movie’s trailers were misleading, and I was hard on it. Some people were enraged, though others were kinder in taking me to task.
Here’s one of the more thoughtful responses from a reader who wished to remain anonymous:
Hi Stephanie,
Interesting takeaway regarding the movie Collateral Beauty. You appear to share a common opinion that those manifestations of death, time, and love were just actors. So many moments throughout that movie, however, suggest something else.
“The devil is in the detail” or to use the more appropriate origin of this idiom, “God is in the detail.”
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I’m not a religious person and I don’t have any affiliation with this particular film, but I do maintain hope for us all to see more.
Kindest regards.
Like most humans, I responded to the onslaught of criticism with a mix of indignation and second-guessing. But rather than give in to the urge to double down on my beliefs, I thought it would be best to have an open, honest discussion on the topic, especially since truth and conversation is something we could use a lot more of these days.
So here goes:
Indignation: Are people really defending a movie about gaslighting?
This was my first reaction. In my mind, “Collateral Beauty” had three twists, but only two of them were intentional. The accidental one was the most shocking for me: The fact that Love, Death and Time were actors, who were paid to mess with the main character’s mind — a character who also happened to be grieving the loss of his six-year-old daughter. (Yes I know Love, Death and Time were also more than paid actors, and I’ll get to that.)
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“The Girl on the Train” might have been a flawed book and movie, but at least (and another spoiler here) it accurately depicted the sick cruelty and lasting damage of gaslighting — the practice of making someone believe they’re crazy by telling them the things they know to be true are false and vice versa.
Share this articleShareAt the start of “Collateral Beauty,” when it became clear that Love, Death and Time didn’t enter Howard’s life of their own accord, as it appeared in the trailer, but at the bidding of three “friends” with somewhat gross intentions, my jaw was on the floor. So it seemed to me like that was the biggest story about the movie. It almost seemed like a public service to warn people that this drama was not what it appeared to be.
Second-guessing: I could have chosen my words better
The more I thought about the situation, the more I realized that the trailer wasn’t lying about the movie so much as spoiling the ending. It turns out — at least by some readings — that Love, Death and Time are both paid actors and angels. In that case, it wasn’t really fair to say that the trailer was lying. It was actually giving a lot away.
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When I wrote about the movie, I wanted to talk about the premise — three friends hire three actors to help their friend and/or sell his company out from under him — rather than reveal the ending, so I left that final magical twist out, but that was understandably confusing to people who had seen the movie. There were ways I could have addressed the inconsistencies in the trailer without giving away too much and making myself seem like a totally uninformed reporter.
Indignation: The true identity of Love, Death and Time are ambiguous
I think you could make an argument that the characters aren’t angels. At the screening I attended, a big group of people were having that very debate, and I could understand why. Maybe Helen Mirren’s Brigitte was coincidentally at the hospital the day Naomie Harris’s Madeleine died. After all, one of the themes of the movie is how everything and everyone is connected. When the main character sees the trio at the end of the movie standing on a bridge before they disappear, could it have been his imagination? Possibly.
Frankly, I believe that the filmmakers had magic in mind, though I didn’t personally find that bit of hocus-pocus to be enough to overcome the problematic nature of the intentions of Howard’s friends.
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Second-guessing: People needed something uplifting
A lot of the people I heard from seemed incredibly wounded by my assessment. I had clearly underestimated how much people needed to feel something good. It has, after all, been a rough year, and who am I to judge movie-goers in search of a little holiday cheer? People went to the theater in search of magic and optimism, and “Collateral Beauty” gave them that. In fact, although the drama didn’t fare well at the box office, viewers who saw it gave it an A- CinemaScore.
The movie received so many bad reviews that publications were aggregating the meanest ones as a way to hold the drama up as an exemplar of awfulness. The reviews almost certainly killed the movie’s box office chances, and I regret piling on with an extra post. My job as a critic is to help people discern between what’s worth seeing and what’s not. For me, the movie was built on a faulty foundation, but it moved me nonetheless. As I said in my separate review of the film: What kind of stone-cold monster wouldn’t get emotional watching a father mourn?
We go to movies for all kinds of reasons, and I think in this case, people went for emotional catharsis, not to mention a guaranteed happy ending. If that’s the case, I missed a bigger point: “Collateral Beauty” doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to feed the audience’s needs, and for a lot of movie-goers, it did.
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