Movie Review

Ok, so can we talk a minute about Will Smith's new movie Collateral Beauty?  I feel I must.  (Obviously, spoiler alert here).


I don't expect a lot from movies about child loss because they usually take either a "God needed another angel" route (ahem, Miracles from Heaven) or show the mother in question handling herself with grace and strength beyond those mere mortals possess (please, pour that on, I love to feel less than).  But I remain curious each time and hopeful that someone will get it marginally right.

So a couple of inconsistencies with the movie that were hit-you-over-the-head obvious:

No one who is that depressed has that clean of a house without the benefit of professional cleaning.

I wanted to know more about the child who had died other than she liked to spin around in circles with her Dad.

Acceptance does not flip the switch to happiness.  Most of the movie centered around the father not being able to say his daughter's name or cause of death.  At the end, when he accomplished this through many tears (and perhaps the best scene of the movie), the next frame showed him smiling and frolicking through the park with his ex-wife.

I've accepted for some time Cory's death and have been able to speak to individuals and groups of people about it and it has not once sent me frolicking through nature with a happy-but-not-too-happy smile on my face.  To accept your child's death is not to like it and does not stop the constant gnawing pain.  It is as Will stated to Time, "a jail sentence".

So let's talk about the ex-wife.  Will's character turned out to be one of the 79%- the 79% of couples who divorce after losing a child.  To state this in the movie only made me, someone hanging out in  21% land by the barest skin of my teeth, wonder just what the cause was?  Did Will not say their child's name enough?  Did he refuse to talk about her?  Did he in a careless moment  throw out twenty years of Christmas ornaments, including every single one the child had ever made?  There's a scenario I'd love to see played out on the big screen.

Let's also talk about how the co-workers schemed together to create footage of Will's character talking to people who would be digitally removed to prove he was incompetent to make business decisions.  This one was unbelievable.  How could Hollywood stoop so low as to make symptoms of Schizophrenia into a game and way for someone to profit?  As someone who has watched someone I love more than myself struggle to know what is real and what is not, I shudder at the insensitivity and stupidity of this plot line.  Shame on you, Hollywood.  Shame, shame, shame.

So then that brings me to the only redeeming line in the whole thing, which took place as Will argued with Death on the subway, "...it's all a bunch of intellectual bullshit, man, cause she's not here to hold my fucking hand!"

Honesty, I spy you.