The remarkable cruelty of this plan is noted only by one of the partners, Claire (Kate Winslet), while the others (Edward Norton and Michael Peña) don’t seem particularly concerned about gaslighting their best friend and former mentor while he’s still coming to terms with the worst experience of his life. Death (Helen Mirren) harasses Howard on a park bench. Time (Jacob Latimore) visits him at the office. Love (Keira Knightley) interrupts his meal at a diner. Dowd’s private detective films all the increasingly aggressive confrontations for legal purposes. In the meantime, Howard visits a grief counseling group led by Madeleine (Naomie Harris), where he tries to accept the fact that his daughter is really gone.

Collateral Beauty was directed by David Frankel, who helmed the similarly treacly Marley and Me, not to mention One Chance, a dramatized retelling of the rise of Paul Potts, the 2007 winner of the reality show Britain’s Got Talent. Written by Allan Loeb (Just Go With It), it was originally going to be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) starring Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara, but Gomez-Rejon left the project after Smith was cast, citing creative differences.

That likely explains why the movie is so tonally inconsistent: Smith gives a performance that implies he’s fishing for serious-actor trophies, while Norton, Winslet, Mirren, and Knightley seem like they’re in a quirky, Birdman-esque comedy about death. Brigitte, Mirren’s gloriously loopy actress, raves about the notes of Grotowski and Stella Adler in her own performance as Death, while Norton is so casually awful in a Silicon Valley way (he notes at one point how ungrateful Howard was about the ayahuasca shaman he shipped over from Peru) that it’s hard to believe he’s taking things totally seriously.

That’s not to say that Smith is bad, simply that he seems to think he’s in a different movie. In Howard’s silent scenes his physicality is tense, with his features set into a semi-permanent grimace; when his character has something to say, he’s quietly understated in communicating the depths of his grief. The plot to have him undermined professionally by his three closest friends, though, is as manipulative and ill-conceived as the movie’s attempts to wring profundity from its ludicrous philosophizing. Its message that time is abundant comes through in the glacial pace of its one hour 36 minute running time, but its Hallmark wisdom about the collateral beauty to be found in the kindness of strangers (or something) remains elusive, even as Howard’s path feels inevitable. That actors this gifted (Winslet and Mirren particularly) can’t disguise what a confused, contemptuous product they’re in isn’t on them; rather, it’s a tragedy something this hollow was made in the first place.

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