Collateral Beauty trailer: Will Smith talks to Love, Death, and Time
Entertainment Weekly
Updated
Oh 2016, you trickster, you weren’t done with us yet. Will Smith, Helen Mirren, Michael Peña, Edward Norton, Naomie Harris, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore, and a partridge in a pear tree star in what is hopefully the year’s last white-elephant gift—a woefully sincere, deeply silly movie about nothing more or less than Love, Time, and Death. No, really: Smith is Howard Inlet, a high-flying New York adman who builds brilliant concepts and makes million-dollar deals, which must be why he’s allowed to give grand speeches to his underlings and ask them apparently-not-rhetorical questions like “What is your why?” without actually expecting a response. But when his six-year-old daughter dies, he retreats into a near-catatonic state, shunning the things he once held dear—work, speech, Seamless—and emerging only to make elaborate domino sculptures in his palatial office, which he listlessly knocks down as soon as they’re finished and walks away from without a backward glance. He’s that sad. Desperate and out of ideas after two years of this misery business, his colleagues (Norton, Peña, and Winslet, all game to a fault) hatch a plan to hire a ragtag trio of freelance thespians and have them pose as the abstract concepts Howard has been penning angry, cathartic letters to: Mirren will play Death, Knightley is Love (of course), and Latimore a sarcastic, skateboarding Time. Can they bring him back from the brink? Are there other life lessons to be learned? Were the craft services on set just completely amazing? Only two of those questions will be answered, though it's not hard to see the big reveal coming, heralded as it is by all the red neon arrows and ah-ooo-gah horns. These actors are too good to be entirely sunk by the sheer silliness of the material (with the exception of Smith, who seems fully committed to playing the role of a human frown-face emoji). But for all good Intentions, they can't save a movie that so clearly wants to be something greater-- It’s a Will-derful Life? Grief, Actually?—but mostly ends up a Collateral mess. C–
It didn't take long for Will Smith to sign on to this December's Collateral Beauty. "It was one of those where you get a screenplay and you are in by page 10. You just go, 'Okay, I'm making this one,'" Smith told EW last month. "It's a really beautiful story and one of those movies that makes the holiday beautiful."
At the time Smith wasn't really able to tell EW too much of the plot beyond the basics: his character, Howard, had suffered a terrible tragedy (now we know: the loss of his daughter) and he has become unmoored in his life. But, Smith cautioned, there is a twist he could not reveal. "It's delicately framed in a way that's going to be tough to promote — you just can't say anything," he laughed.
Now with this first trailer — which you can watch above — we can understand maybe a little bit more about what Smith was talking about. Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, and Jacob Latimore play Death, Love, and Time, respectively — all seemingly summoned by Howard, who has been writing and mailing grief-stricken letters to the big three. Or are they? Smith described the movie (directed by David Frankel and also starring Edward Norton and Kate Winslet) as It's aWonderful Life meets The Wizard of Oz — and if that makes sense to you, congratulations — so we may have to wait till Dec. 16 when Collateral Beauty arrives in theaters to know the full story.
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Olympic gold medal and two-time NCAA champion wrestler Gable Steveson has signed with the Buffalo Bills. He'll attempt to make the team as a defensive tackle.
The New Orleans Pelicans have opted not to take the Los Angeles Lakers' first-round pick in this year's NBA Draft as part of the Anthony Davis trade. The Pelicans will take the Lakers' pick next year.
